The humanity experiment has mixed results: Organ trade and enslaving the disabled

Uplifting the naked ape is having mixed results ...

Your money for your life - enslaving the cognitively disabled (China)

Out of more than 20 similar cases that occurred from 2007 to 2011 nationwide, most of the suspects came from Leibo. Mentally disabled people were sold here to criminals and then taken to mines in other provinces including Fujian, Hebei, Shandong and Liaoning.

... According to the Wuhan-based Chutian Metropolis Daily, many villagers in Leibo county exploit mentally disabled people, either forcing them to work under appalling conditions, often unpaid and poorly fed, or by profiting from their deaths.

From July to August last year, the central hospital in Leibo received eight mentally disabled patients, aged between 20 and 50 years old, after they had been rescued by local police in an operation.

They only weighed about 40 kilograms on average, with a dull look and slow reactions, had very little appetite and had lost their instinct for survival. They all died of multi-organ failure within two months.

Liu Xingwei, vice secretary of Leibo county's Politics and Law Committee, told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald that no legal action was taken against the traffickers, who had snatched the victims under the claim of "sheltering" them, "because there is no related law."

and

Organ-selling firm in NHS talks - mirror.co.uk

... a subsidiary of the General ­Healthcare Group – Netcare – was last year fined nearly £700,000 after pleading guilty to illegally transplanting human organs in South Africa.

... Netcare admitted last November that it had recruited children to donate kidneys which were then transplanted to wealthy clients. More than 100 illegal operations were carried out at a hospital in Durban, South Africa, between 2001 and 2003.

In a statement issued last November, the company said payments were “made to the donors for their kidneys, and that certain of the kidney donors were minors”. The statement added: “Certain employees participated in these illegalities, and (the hospital) wrongly benefited from the proceeds.”

The company said the organ-selling scandal had been dealt with “by the South African legal system and is now closed”.

Heck of a fine. More via Google on the GHG / Netcare scandal, which actually dates to about 2003. Crime paid; the bad guys got away ...

Kidneygate: What the Netcare bosses really knew - Investigations - Mail & Guardian Online

On May 27 four Durban surgeons are due to stand trial for their part in South Africa's kidney trafficking scandal.

But evidence in the Mail & Guardian's possession suggests that top Netcare executives are fortunate not to be standing beside them.

"Kidneygate" is the long-running saga of how -- between about 2000 and 2003 -- about 200 Israeli patients with kidney disease were brought to South Africa to receive organs from living donors who were presented as their relatives.

The donors were in fact poor Brazilians, Israelis and Romanians who were recruited by international organ traffickers and paid a relatively modest sum to give up a precious kidney -- a criminal offence under South African law.

To make matters worse, at least five of the donors are now known to have been legal minors at the time of the operations.

The four doctors -- John Robbs, Ariff Haffejee, Neil Christopher and Mahadev Naidoo -- are bitter at finding themselves at the short end of a chain of ethical dissimulation.

In theory, the buck stops with the doctor doing the cutting, but in reality, the transplant surgeons were little more than skilled mechanics dealing with bodies on an assembly line, maintained, paid for and legally underwritten by the big healthcare factory that is the Netcare Group.

Netcare: not know or not care?Investigations by the M&G suggest that the biggest scandal of the case, which has dragged on since the first arrests in 2003, is the absence from the dock of any decision-maker from Netcare.

The company's Durban subsidiary, Netcare KwaZulu-Natal trading as St Augustine's Hospital, did plead guilty, paid a R4-million fine and agreed to a R3.8-million confiscation order in November 2010.

The organ trade: 10 % of organ transplants now fully commercial

Susanne Lundin is Professor of Ethnology at Lund University, Sweden. This commentary of hers appeared in Daily News Egypt ...

The great organ bazaar by Susan Lundin.

LUND, SWEDEN: The Web site 88DB.com Philippines is an active online portal that allows service providers and consumers to find and interact with each other. Naoval, an Indonesian man with “AB blood type, no drugs and no alcohol,” wants to sell his kidney. Another man says, “I am a Filipino. I am willing to sell my kidney for my wife. She has breast cancer and I can’t afford her medications.” Then there is Enrique, who is “willing to donate my kidney for an exchange. 21 years old and healthy.”

Other offers of this type could, just a few years ago, be found at www.liver4you.org, which promised kidneys for $80,000-$110,000. The costs of the operation, including the fees of the surgeons — licensed in the United States, Great Britain, or the Philippines — would be included in the price.

All of this internet activity is but the tip of the iceberg of a new and growing global human-tissue economy. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that about 10 percent of organ transplants around the world stem from purely commercial transactions.

Trade in organs follows a clear, geographically linked pattern: people from rich countries buy the organs, and people in poor countries sell them. In my research on organ trafficking, I have entered some of these shadow markets, where body parts from the poor, war victims, and prisoners are commodities, bought or stolen for transplant into affluent ill people.

One woman, originally from Lebanon, told me that a wealthy businessman from Spain paid a huge sum for her kidney. In the end, however, she received no monetary payment. Today, her life is much worse than before, because medical complications following the operation make it difficult for her to work. Similar stories are told by organ vendors I have met from the former Soviet states, the Middle East, and Asia.

Organ trafficking depends on several factors. One is people in distress. They are economically or socially disadvantaged, or live in war-torn societies with prevalent crime and a thriving black market. On the demand side are people who are in danger of dying unless they receive an organ transplant. Additionally, there are organ brokers who arrange the deals between sellers and buyers.

It is also necessary to have access to well-equipped clinics and medical staff. Such clinics can be found in many countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Ukraine, South Africa, and the Philippines.

Indeed, the Philippines is well known as a center of the illegal organ trade and a “hot spot” for transplant tourism. From the 1990s until 2008 (when a new policy was adopted), the number of transplantations involving organ sales by Filipinos to foreign recipients increased steadily. Many organ sellers from Israel, for example, were, together with their buyers, brought to Manila for the transplants.

Hector is one of the several hundred cases of kidney vendors documented by social workers in three impoverished towns in the Philippines’ Quezon province. His brother was trapped in Malaysia with high debts to criminal gangs, so Hector sold his kidney in order to buy his freedom. Another vendor, Michel, became a broker himself; after selling one of his kidneys to pay for his father’s medicines, the surgeon forced him to deliver more organs. The vendors’ organs were transplanted to recipients mainly from the Philippines, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia...

A trade that probably cannot be effectively banned, but can certainly be taxed and regulated.

The kidney trade thrives

The kidney trade is growing ...

• The village of the kidneys - Nepali Times: A village near Kathmandu is the "Kidney Bank".
• Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade - Bloomberg: "An American man had promised to give Picado, a 23-year-old high school dropout who worked as a construction laborer, a job and an apartment in New York if he’d donate one of his kidneys. He jumped at the deal, his mother says."
• NK defector in legal dispute over organ transplantation
• For Chinese, kidney donation is a click away - Features - Al Jazeera English
• Blood & Treasure: redundant organs: The youth and motivation (iPad) of the donor made this more prominent.

Bloomberg has had the best recent coverage of the organ trade. A long and slightly rambling article provides important background ...

Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade - Bloomberg

... Every year, about 5,000 gravely ill people from countries including the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia pay others to donate an organ, says Francis Delmonico, a Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon. The practice is illegal in every country except Iran, Delmonico says.

Affluent, often desperately ill patients travel to countries such as Egypt, Peru and the Philippines, where poor people sell them their organs. In Latin America, the transplants are usually arranged by unlicensed brokers. They’re performed -- for fees -- by accredited surgeons, some of whom have trained at the world’s leading medical schools.

The global demand for organs far exceeds the available supply. In the U.S., 110,693 people are on waiting lists for organs, and fewer than 15,000 donors are found annually.

Americans who go abroad for illicit transplants can contract infections or HIV from unhealthy donors, posing a public health threat when they return, Delmonico says...

... Medical tourism company MedToGo LLC, based in Tempe, Arizona, says it will offer kidney transplants in Mexico and Costa Rica for about $50,000, a fifth of the cost in the U.S....

... “The poor have become a spare-parts bank for the well-to- do,” says University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who specializes in organ trafficking.

The Peruvian National Prosecutor’s Office is investigating 61 transplants in seven of Lima’s top hospitals since 2004, documents in the case show. Peraldo is one of 150 brokers, doctors, nurses and others under investigation, says Jesus Asencios, the prosecutor leading the probe....

Note the key feature of MedToGo is not their cost savings, it's that they procure kidneys in ways that circumvent, and perhaps violate, US, Costa Rican and Mexican law.

If the trade cannot be stopped, then it must be regulated. If a country decides it wants an organ trade, they can set a fixed rate that's paid every donor, regardless of whether the recipient is local or foreign. They can tax foreign transplants so that every foreign transplant pays for two local transplants.

Get your international transpant with MedToGo

It occurred to me that a custom Google news section would help me track the worldwide retail organ business.

The results were more impressive than I'd expected.

Here's one ...

Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys From Peru Poor in Fatal Trade - Bloomberg

... Medical tourism company MedToGo LLC, based in Tempe, Arizona, says it will offer kidney transplants in Mexico and Costa Rica for about $50,000, a fifth of the cost in the U.S...

MedToGo has an agreeable web site. Owned and operated by US physicians, who are facilitating trafficking in the organs of the poor. I wonder; are there any state licensing board issues?

The organ trade is one of those curious stories that get little press attention.

Update 5/19/11: MedToGo's CEO wrote to object to the way they were portrayed in the Bloomberg article. They say they provide access to transplants performed in Mexico to Americans and Canadians, but only with American and Canadian donors. I am curious how that can be done, since I am sure they are bypassing North American transplant boards. They also say they do not pay donors, but they do not say the donors are unpaid. Based on MedToGo's response I've modified my post title and content as above.

See also:

• Organlegging Neuromancer style – China’s liver trade 5/10
• Enlightenment 2.0 and a Hong Kong student post on the Chinese organ trade (5/07)
• Niven scores: The organ trade grows (4/06)

Organlegging Neuromancer style – China’s liver trade

Organlegging was Larry Niven’s 1970s term for trafficking in human organs. Gibson’s fiction, including the fabulous (1984!!) Neuromancer, featured Chinese organ shops. Cross organlegging with Neuromancer and fast forward to 2010.

How do people not raised on science fiction get their head around the modern world? It’s really a disability of sorts.

Since my 2006 organ trade post (see also) the market has continued to mature …

Blood & Treasure- the liver trade

… Type in Baidu and search for “looking for liver, kidney” and so on words, tens of thousands of results show up, including QQ numbers*, cell phone numbers, some even operate like a company. They not only look for people willing to sell their livers and kidneys, at the same time they also advertise to provide livers and kidneys that match the patients. Reporter contacted number of organ trading brokers and found that they had a clear set of requirements, and the business also formed “one shop stop” service…

Liver segment and single kidney donation is usually survivable.

Is anyone in the US paying attention?

No, I didn’t think so.

* tencent QQ

… is the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Mainland China, and has over 856.2 million users. In April 2010, QQ.com ranked 10th overall in Alexa's internet rankings. The program is maintained by Tencent Holdings Limited (HKEX: 0700), owned in part by Naspers…

I’d never learn this stuff if I didn’t have my Chinese-focused blogs to read. The mainstream media is hopelessly lost.

Update: After posting this, I revisited a link in my 2006 post to a 2004 NYT article. There I found mention of "Organs Watch" - an organization tracking the global organ trade. The web site, however is "under construction"; the notice refers to an August 2009 update that never happened. Nancy Scheper-Hughes led Organs Watch, but the last news of her is from 2008. Reading between the lines of the Wikipedia article, I wonder if she might have gone a bit off the rails ("Israel" and "tentacles" in the same sentence is a bit of a red light). She was still teaching at Berkeley in Fall 2009.

The organ trade mafia of New Jersey

The mob goes where the money is, though this time it’s not Italian …

Dozens Arrested in New Jersey Corruption Probe - WSJ.com

… The alleged money-laundering operations run by the rabbis laundered about $3 million for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, according to the court documents and a person familiar with the matter. The rabbis used charitable, nonprofit entities connected to their synagogues to "wash" money they understood came from criminal activity, prosecutors alleged.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn was charged separately with conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant, at a cost of $160,000 to the transplant recipient. According to the FBI's complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had been brokering the sale of kidneys for 10 years…

"The rings were international in scope, connected to Deal, N.J., Brooklyn, N.Y., Israel and Switzerland," said Mr. Marra, the U.S. attorney, at the news conference. "They trafficked in the cleaning of dirty money all across the world."

Rabbis doing money laundering in New Jersey is mildly interesting. The organ trade angle is truly interesting.

Update 7/24/09: TPM is tracking the organ trade angle.

Update 9/2/09: I'm getting some creepy comments on this post, of the Protocols of Zion sort. They're all being rejected, so don't bother.

The interesting aspects of Steve Job’s alleged liver transplant

A surgeon expresses the thoughts on the mind of every physician who’s heard that Steve Jobs received a liver transplant (per WSJ) for a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor …

What's wrong with Steve Jobs, revisited : Respectful Insolence

… How many people are capable of getting themselves listed for transplant in a state nearly 2,000 miles away from their home? When a liver becomes available, there isn't much time to get to the hospital. That means a person seeking a transplant in another state either has to stay in that state for as long as it takes to get an organ or be within a distance to be able to fly there within a very short period of time. Moreover, organs eligibility and availability are determined by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which maintains the donor lists. When an donor is identified, regional and state organizations (in my home state, for example, Gift of Life, where one of my relatives works), obtain consent, arrange for organ harvest, and decide, based on fairly strict criteria published by UNOS regarding medical need and practical matters like how long it will take to get the organs out and to the hospitals where they are needed, which people on the waiting list for the state will receive each of the organs harvested. If this story is true, what Jobs did is not illegal, but it sure does leave an unpleasant stench of the rich and powerful taking advantage of regional differences in organ availability, perhaps at the expense of a lifelong Tennessee resident who needs a liver…

… Worse, the indication is somewhat shaky. For one thing, as was pointed out in the article, neuroendocrine tumors are generally very slow growing and take a long time to metastasize. One of the more "common" subtypes of the rare neuroendocrine tumor in particular, a carcinoid of the appendix or the rectum, is particularly prone to metastasize to the liver and is notorious for causing carcinoid syndrome, which is due to serotonin secretion by these tumors and causes flushing, diarrhea and other unpleasant symptoms…

In the United States organs are gifts from the dead to strangers. Most of the donors are not wealthy. In this country we don’t, yet, seem to have much of a commercial market in organs – though the organ trade is growing in much of the world (the sale of sperm and eggs, by contrast, is a very active US market, sure to be increasingly global).

The story of Jobs liver transplant has two interesting aspects. Both demonstrate what power can achieve.

One aspect is that it was kept pretty much out of the media, though clearly thousands must have known the details. In this regard it resembles the seven month media silence about the imprisonment of a senior NYT journalist in Taliban-occupied Pakistan . The modern world is better at keeping secrets than many imagine.

The second aspect is that it shows that we need to talk more about organ distribution. The rich will always have access to more health care options – though, as in this case, it may lead them to make medically sub-optimal choices. On the other hand, organs are a gift from people who are usually not themselves powerful. Given two equally appropriate candidates, one powerful and one not, I’d rather my liver go to the less privileged. It’s my way of spitting in the face of a fundamentally unjust universe.

We should be talking about the organ trade.

Outsourcing surrogacy - and what comes next

FuturePundit: Pregnancy Surrogacy Outsourced To India. No surprises, unfortunately.

I'm tagging this one as "organ trade", though I suspect there will be eugenic implications as well. Some of the newborns, after all, will be defective. Will the contractors, produces, directors, egg and sperm donors necessarily accept defective units?

The surrogate mothers will suffer the usual lifespan reduction and disability associated with human pregnancy.

Come the clones

I used to think that one good feature of the religious right was that they might slow the day we harvest clones for organs.

Then came the eugenics revolution and the end of Downs syndrome. Emily is convinced there's a causal relationship between the rise of 21st century eugenics and the collapse of the GOP's anti-abortion movement. (Oh, you didn't notice it had collapsed? It has.)

Next came the American embrace of torture. At least 50% of Americans, in most polls, are just fine with torture.

Now this:

Monkey Embryos Cloned for Stem Cells - washingtonpost.com

...Researchers in Oregon reported yesterday that they had created the world's first fully formed, cloned monkey embryos and harvested batches of stem cells from them...

If it works in monkeys it will work in us.

So now we have our stem cell source. Next up will be to let the clone produce differentiated tissues that we have a use for. Then it will be early organs.

I knew I'd miss the religious right.

Enlightenment 2.0 and a Hong Kong student post on the Chinese organ trade

Connections are established, reinforced, strengthened. The river finds a new channel. The new flow alters other flows and channels. The river and the landscape think, solving problems in hydrology and geography.

That's how we imagine that our minds work. That's the way Hopfield explained it to me around 1981, when he and others returned to the long interrupted study of neural networks. That's the way Google forges connections, doing forward and back chaining. That's the way a hive thinks, and our hivemind grows.

This is a story of the Chinese organ trade, and the hivemind. It begins with a feed.

I wrote a Google Blog Search query a while back that generated an RSS feed that's tracked by my bloglines reader. Bloglines notifies me when the search returns a new link to my blog. It's a erratic process; sometimes links appear immediately, sometimes I get a link that was formed a year ago. Most often I discover a "splog" has taken a post of mine, turned it into a splog post, and I'm just seeing an externalized version of my internal links.

Every so often though, it returns something fascinating. Today it uncovered an article on China's organ trade law written by a Hong Kong journalism student today as part of a class exercise (JMSC 0042 I presume). I've corrected some trivial spelling and grammar errors. Emphases mine.

International News (JMSC 0042) - Organ Trade finally banned in China

candicecheng - May 4, 2007 @ 10:37 am · Uncategorized

Xinhua reported (May 1) that China’s first set of regulations on human organ transplant took effect on Tuesday.

The new regulations, issued by the State Council, ban organizations and individuals from trading human organs in any form. Doctors found to be involved in the process will have their practitioner licenses revoked. Clinics against the new regulations will also be suspended for at least three years. The fines are fixed to be between eight to ten times of the outlawed trade value. (See full set of regulations in simplified Chinese.)

The regulations also state that human organ transplants should follow the principle of free will. And obtaining organs, such as the heart, lung, liver, kidney and pancreas, without the owner’s permission or free will is a crime. ( Learn more about organ transplant here.)

The regulations, however, do not apply to transplants of human tissue, such as cells, cornea and marrow.

China has operated organ transplants for more than 20 years. It is the world’s second largest performer of transplants after the United States, with about 5,000 transplants operated each year.

Legal organ donations are made by ordinary Chinese at death with a donation agreement signed voluntarily during lifetime.

Nevertheless, there has been a huge gap between the demand for functional organs and the supply of donations. According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, about 1.5 million patients need organ transplants each year but there are only 10000 organs transplanted.

This gave rise to a flourishing black market of organ trade. Wealthy Chinese or foreigners who are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars can arrange the deal with a broker and have their transplants done in a week’s time. It is reported that a kidney costs around $80,000. Nevertheless, most of the time, the source of the organ is unknown. (See a transplant tourism story here.)

China was recently being accused of selling organs from executed prisoners and was heavily criticized by human right groups. Officials did not deny the practice but said that they did it with the consent of the prisoners. Families of the prisoners, however, disagreed. (See full story here.) (This leads to one question: if the officials continue to insist that they are taking prisoners’ organs with their consent and not for profit, will the new regulations help to stop this “unethical practice”?)

Bloggers have different reactions towards China’s ban on organ trade. One blogger said that he was surprised that China would really go to the step of banning organ trade under the international pressure...

This so reminds me of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End", about which I ought to say more. A few notes, though they are probably obvious:

1. I follow this subject, and I learned more from this blog post than from any other source in any mainstream media. There was nothing that contradicted my existing knowledge, so I have some confidence in the new knowledge.
   
   
2. It's weird that they picked my post as one of two examples of the "blogger perspective".
   
   
3. A connection has been established. I'm adding this Hong Kong journalism class blog to my regular feeds. What better source for an english language perspective on China?
   
   
4. China has not enforced its laws very well, but that seems to be changing. The fine of "8-10x" the value of the traded organ strikes me as the work of someone who is serious about controlling this practice.
   
   
5. If anything is going to save us from ourselves, it is the hivemind. Do your part.
   

Corzine didn't wear a seatbelt - does your dog have one?

Corzine didn't wear a seatbelt. It's a characteristic of humans, they confuse power over people with power over physics. Kudos to McDonald for an excellent post, and for the valuable reference to Princess Di the seatbelt-less. In Minnesota Corzine would have gotten a ticket, but New Jersey's mandatory seatbelt law isn't due yet ($20 fine).

I wonder if Corzine will consider appearing in public service messages supporting the new law?

Despite my commie credentials, I have sympathy for the libertarian perspective. I think adults should be allowed to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or a car without a seatbelt -- as long they then forfeit ownership of their organs in the event of brain death. The benefits to organ recipients will outweigh the costs of care for the seatbelt-less who survive.

BTW, your dog needs a seatbelt too. They need it because they're not sentient decision makers, and because a flying 80 lb dog can break your child's neck. Our dog wears a sled dog harness and appears fond of it; I think she likes the feeling of security it gives her. The harness was used for skijoring back when we had snow, and it works for high speed inline skate action too.

China limits the retail organ trade

I'm surprised the government is taking action; I'd not thought they were really feeling pressured.

China issues human organ transplant rules in attempt to clean up industry - International Herald Tribune

China has published rules governing human organ transplants ...

... The new regulations issued Friday by China's State Council, or Cabinet, include a ban on the sale of human organs for profit and on donations by people under 18, according to the text of the regulations published by the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily.

The rules, which take effect May 1, also make it illegal to harvest human organs without permission, and standardize transplant procedures at the limited number of hospitals licensed to perform such operations.

Little information about China's lucrative transplant business is publicly available. Human rights groups have said many organs — including those transplanted into wealthy foreigners — come from executed prisoners who may not have given their permission.

"The regulations show that China is responding to great international concern over organ trade in the country," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview...

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency said most organs used in transplants come from deceased Chinese citizens who had voluntarily donated. But according to Bequelin, more than 90 percent of organs used in transplants were obtained from judicial executions.

A senior Chinese health official acknowledged last year that a majority of organs were harvested from executed prisoners, but only with their prior consent, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper...

... Health officials say China faces a severe shortage of human organs, estimating that out of 1.5 million people who need transplants in China each year, only about 10,000 operations are carried out.

Voluntary donations remain far below demand in China, partly due to cultural biases against organ removal before burial

I wonder how bad things were getting. As predicted by Niven about 40 years ago, the combination of a low threshold for the death penalty and organ harvesting prior to execution (in China I believe the practice is to harvest first, then "execute") leads to a very steep downhill slope. Even with that combination, however, China is meeting about 0.5% of the organ demand.

One driver for this legislation may be the legitimate concern that rich foreigners will buy up what organs are available, further limiting availability in China.

Retail organs: not a slippery slope

The transfer of organs from the weak to the strong, from the poor to the richer, is not a slippery slope. No, not at all.

Slippery implies some possibility of friction. Slope implies the possibility of balance. We need a better metaphor. How about 'obvious cliff'?

Alas, the trade continues to expand exponentially, despite my screed of last April. The Economist is the latest champion.

Gee, you'd think nobody reads this thing. The egg-donation and kidney transfer trade is big these days, much bigger than the involuntary donations of Chinese "criminals". It's a true 21st century growth industry. Niven, alas, was spot on thirty years ago. If we come up with really good anti-rejection treaments the exponential growth curve will go vertical. Eye transplants anyone? After all, one can live well with one eye.

Sigh.

There is a darkly millenial bright side. Sooner or later, maybe after the eye donations and the hemi-hepatectomies are booming, this trade will tip us into reexamining the duties of the strong to the weak, the rich to the poor, and the limited adaptability of the human to a logically utilitarian ethos.

I'm sure I'll have similar comments in another 6-12 months.

Fresh organs from China: kill to order

We've known for years that China harvested organs from condemned prisoners. I, like many others, expected this practice to be monetized. I didn't anticipate this practice, though in retrospect it's obvious:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Involuntary Organ Donors

Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society's ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution.

In other words the prisoners are kept alive until their organs are needed, then they are killed. Sort of like cooking lobster.

Maybe there's still time to reconsider those Olympics? Not that the US is in any position to point fingers, Bush has reduced our reputation to the national equivalent of "psychotic pedophile".

Niven scores: The organ trade grows

Larry Niven made his mark as a science fiction writer in the 1970s and 1980s. Among his earlier writings are a series of stories about organlegging, an illegal and legal trade in human organs. In Niven's books organ rejection has been solved and transplants promise a form of immortality. Jaywalking becomes a capital crime; executed prisoners are the primary source of legal organ donation.

We haven't solved the rejection problem, but Niven gets full marks anyway. Recently China's executed prisoners have been donating their organs to Japan. In 2004 the NYT profiled the sales of a Brazilian live donor kidney to an American recipient. A NYT ethics columnist was asked about another kidney sale to a US donor. Some years ago I read an extraordinary NYT article examining the sale of Chinese and Pakistani organs throughout asia, including sale to US recipients who traveled for their transplants (I cannot find the reference!).

This is a true growth industry, there's big money to be made for those who've developed their moral fiber in the tobacco industry. And what about those ethics?

From an ethical point of view, the prisoner trade is more clearly wrong. It incents the state to execute, and the prisoner gets nothing from the deal. The "voluntary" donations from the impoverished are in practice also terribly wrong, but the reasoning is more complex.

If my family was mired in dire poverty, I would probably donate a kidney for the right price. Alas, in practice the social consequences of this sort of transaction are likely to be so severe that they outweigh any theoretical utilitarian benefit to donor and recipient. In any case, in our world, such trade would take advantage of hundreds of millions of people with limited judgement and cognitive abilities -- taking their organs for a song.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Any physician partaking in this trade in any way should have their diploma revoked.

PS. I would be remiss if I did not mention my solution to a part of the organ shortage. In the US there are many, many adults who want to ride a motorbike with a helmet. We should simply require that than any brain-dead motorcyclist recovered without a helmet is a mandatory organ donor ...

Regenerating mice? I don't believe it

The Australian: It's a miracle: mice regrow hearts [August 29, 2005]

The web is alive with news of a gen-engineered mice that can regrow organs (except, most interestingly the brain -- as though the brain has a deep commitment to unaltered structures). It smells like cold fusion to me. Too incredible, too unanticipated, too revolutionary.

We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow," she said.

"It is quite remarkable. The only organ that did not grow back was the brain.

"When we injected fetal liver cells taken from those animals into ordinary mice, they too gained the power of regeneration. We found this persisted even six months after the injection."

Professor Heber-Katz made her discovery when she noticed the identification holes that scientists punch in the ears of experimental mice healed without any signs of scarring in the animals at her laboratory.

The self-healing mice, from a strain known as MRL, were then subjected to a series of surgical procedures. In one case the mice had their toes amputated -- but the digits grew back, complete with joints.

In another test some of the tail was cut off, and this also regenerated. Then the researchers used a cryoprobe to freeze parts of the animals' hearts, and watched them grow back again. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed.

The researchers believe the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring their animals' survival rate. However, the mice are only 18 months old, and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach firm conclusions.

I'd bet my $10 there's something funny here.