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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
theodp writes "Newsweek reports that a grim trade in stolen human tissue isn't just the stuff of Robin Cook novels. Demand for the tissue, which is used in such procedures as joint and heart-valve replacements, back surgery, dental implants and skin grafts, has driven the price for a single harvested body up to $7,000. Many unsuspecting recipients are now rushing to doctors to be tested for tainted tissue."
I'm not giving my brain back.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Reminds me of the time I woke up in a tub of ice and note to call the hospital imediatly. I still miss my kidney.....
Honestly, how do you tell the difference between good tissue from a legitimate source and good tissue from an illegal source? If they didn't fuck up, conceivably you won't notice...
It's only an insult if it's not true.
We'll get Ducky and Abby on it right away.
(Anyone around here watch that episode? Some interesting information there)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Lawyers for all the men have insisted their clients did nothing illegal
Forging death certificates? Supplying stolen, possibly diseased, human tissue to medical facilities, which presumably are going to give it to patients who are already ill? And they argue that there's nothing illegal about this?
The lawyers themselves should almost be on trial.
I thought a kidney was 10K easily. TV has lied to me and those student loans are only getting bigger.
Could be worse.
Maybe soon it will be.
I'd be pretty pissed if someone used taint tissue on me too!
Creepy...
John Holmes got so, uh, popular.
Makes me hope for a day when cloning techniques allow replacements to be grown from your own cells.
Of course, that still won't stop sh*t like this. Part of this problem stems from the fact that we're so paranoid about human parts(mostly deservably), that demand outstrips supply enough to inflate values into the stratosphere.
There's always somebody willing to save a buck by introducing or substituting substandard materials.
I don't read AC A human right
This sorta thing just came up on nationstates for me. Inmates are now compulsory organ donars. Im not sure if that means theyre harvested as needed, or if everything goes if they get shanked or something.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I've been in a certain central-american country where they'd kill you for your passport, because they could sell it fo a measly $500.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It strikes me as kinda sick that there is any legitimate buisiness in human body parts. Whatever happened to simply donating body parts where money only enters the equation to cover costs?
I think I'm right in saying that those countries where people are paid to give blood have a less stable blood supply and the blood they do get is of lower quality (more likely to be from a sick person) than those countries which rely on altruism for their blood. Won't it be the same with other body parts?
This explains the state of the President of the U.S.A.
Someone should make a computer game where you hunt for people who won't likely be missed....try to harvest them with minimal damage to the tissues...play your distribution routes...build and maintain a reputation for non-diseased tissue...
They could call it "Grand Theft Body" or something like that....
Sounds like a money-maker to me.
So, can we have your liver then?
I am officially gone from
No names and no pack drill.
I worked for a man who was incredibly rich and extremely well connected, there might have been things he couldn't buy, like some countries, due to lack of money, and there was one thing he could not buy in reality, which was sight for his blind daughter...
However he did tell me very matter of factly that when you were a millionaire it was a simple matter of going to miami where jewish doctors (I'm repeating what I was told, so I'm not going to alter it to remove any racial / religious references in a bid to make it more credible etc) would sell you any transplantable organ or tissue you liked, at a price, harvested from medically screened live donors, said donors being sourced in south america.
A healthy 20 year old heart, chosen to match your tissue etc etc etc
He was as matter of facts about things that were just there and available to the super rich as we would be about a 1U web server, it's there if you want it.
I doubt the actual true non politically correct market value of a single average human life has increased any in the intervening 19 years.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
The 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers is basically a riff on the 1951 Heinlein novel, The Puppet Masters, which originated the concept of aliens taking over people's minds. Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe has "organleggers."
Find free books.
From the pdf file the_immune_system:
Immunology and Transplants
Each year thousands of American lives are prolonged by transplanted organs -- kidney,heart,lung,liver,and pancreas.For a transplant to "take," however,,the body 's natural tendency to rid itself of foreign tissue must be overridden. One way,tissue typing ,makes sure markers of self on the donor 's tissue are as similar as possible to those of the recipient.Each cell has a double set of 6 major tissue
antigens,and each of the antigens exists, in different individuals,in as many as 20 varieties.The chance of 2 people having identical transplant antigens is about 1 in 100,000.
Transplant patients must first overcome these odds. If it were me I think my tendency would be to breathe a sigh of relief at having found donor tissue and that relief might make me tend to put questions about tissue health on the back burner.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
There is only one explaination for this phenomenon, the republicans! Their current candidates aren't working so their digging up their old ones!
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
For those of you who wonder about how they test for "tainted" tissue, it's rather easy:
Does the patient now have a disease that they didn't have before the transplant? Were they at risk to contract the disease independently of the transplant? If someone who has been married for 50 years suddenly shows up with AIDS, hepititis, etc. it's a pretty good bet it's from the transplant and not risky sexual behaviour. You assess the patient and see if a new condition they are experiencing is due to lifestyle or other factors.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
...the USDA label with a grade of "H" or better. You can also go for free-range humans that you can have killed on the spot so you know where they are coming from.
If I get him a kidney transplant, it'll give him another few years. I live in Manhattan where an operation like this is cost-prohibitive, but I'm willing to drive wherever it takes to get this done. Any of you know where I can get a cheap kitty kidney? My dog's getting old -- can cats accept k-9 organs? Thanks, sorry to get off topic.
The proper term for this practice is organlegging, not body snatching. Read Larry Niven to see where this may go.
Every organ transplant recipient should be strongly pressured to donate all their own organs when they die, if they're in acceptable condition. And the transplanting doctors should share some of the money they receive for the operation with the donor's family (or other beneficiary). The death of the donor should be sufficient prohibition for selling their organs. If it's not, the indestructible illegal trade will offer a market anyway.
Along these lines, I don't know why there's always such a severe blood shortage. Most people receiving blood transfusions schedule their surgery weeks or months in advance. It only takes a couple of weeks for drawn blood to regenerate. They should all have drawn the maximum they can handle from the moment their requirements are known until their surgery. And after they recover, they should submit even more. They should count primarily on their own autologous donations, which tax the healthcare system so much less by "matching the donor" without extensive tests and mistakes, as well as leaving the donations of other people alone. Everyone who receives blood from a stranger even once should have to donate at least once a year for several following years, health permitting. Maybe they should receive discounts on their own care when "giving back", maybe they should be required to donate if "in the system" for receiving from strangers. But there's absolutely no reason that scheduled blood demands should offer anything but a pool of donors, instead of the overwhelming demand we see now.
--
make install -not war
There's a fascinating book related to this topic, "Death, Dissection and the Destitute" by Ruth Richardson. Although the primary focus of the book is the circumstances leading up to the Anatomy Act of 1832 and the Act's passage into law, themes today seem much the same today as they ever were. The 2nd edition also has a postscript with a fair chunk of commentary on the current state of affairs around the world.
I did, however, get a few funny looks from fellow commuters whilst reading it on the way to work.
When selling your organs is illegal, only criminals will sell organs.
If I want to sell my dead body for a certain price, get some extra cash for my beneficiaries, why the hell can't I?
If it were legal and not some spooooooooky nonsense via Newsweek, the price would come down, and there'd be no shortage of spare parts.
Lots of possibilities that we're missing... (and yeah, jokes ha ha, or whine about the 3rd worlders getting chopped, but come on - get it out in the open and shine light on it, and the black market has a chance to disappear).
I'd like to see a taint transplant.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
For an alternate universe look at legal harvesting of human tissue, consider the recent Ishiguro novel "Never Let Me Go".
Farnsworth: Please, old friend, don't jump! Use another method that won't damage your liver! Other people need it, you know!
You thought that now they're turning 60 their influence is starting to wane.... WELL YOU'RE WRONG! Your body parts are their new status symbols! Nothing will prepare you for the horror, the mayhem and the fright of :
Invasion of the Body Snatchers II: Revenge and Resurrection of the Aging Baby Boomers
(Sountrack by the Greatful Dead)
I really like this idea. Part of the agreement is that you must donate your organs when you die - You in effect are GPL'ing yourself.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
This was certainly not a troll. Must every non-mainstream opinion be marginalized??!!
MSNBC ran a story on this the other day....
An intersting aside is that apparently Alistair Cooke, the host of "Masterpiece Theatre" was one of the deceased who's organs were harvested by these people.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
...never heard of it.
As long as there is big money to be made in medicine, this will be a problem. I'm not saying that doctors should work cheap. Just saying big money brings out the criminal element. No doubt they will find this has been going on a long time.
So who is going to let themselves die in order to sell their organs to a foreign interest? Unless by donor you mean victim.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You're not joking... are you?
Your cat is as able to accept a dog kidney as you are. Which is to say, not at all. Even if you could find a vet who would do a cat kidney transplant, your cat will not be happy living on anti-rejection drugs anyway. Make him comfortable, put him to sleep when it is time. Such is the unavoidable tragedy of pet ownership.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The most tragic outcome of this story is that it might discourage tissue and organ donation. The advantages of tissue donation in particular are not as widely known as they should be. Where organ donation requires tissue type matching, tissue donation does not, and tissue donation is an option for far more people who want to make a contribution after death (including the elderly and many who are in very poor shape at the time of death). It can be an option for those dying at home under hospice care. Tissue donation can benefit 50-100 people.
http://shareyourlife.org/
http://organdonor.gov/
http://www.rtix.com/index.cfm
http://lifecell.com/
http://www.cryolife.com/
In 1997 I used to write software for capturing images during renal endoscopy exams, part of the job involved going to conventions and talking to physicians like Urologists and General Surgeons. One Urologist who was part of the VA hospital circuit in the U.S. told me that sometimes they receive kidneys and other related parts from vague sources with notes stating that they can get more of the same quality for a fixed price. They get binned, don't even reach the surgical floor. For most, the quality was never really that good, they could tell if the donor was deceased at the time of extraction and most were and had been for some time, but some looked very healthy indeed. But it was just a bio-hazard, no testing of the donor, no history, straight in the bin.
Task Mangler
Bet they don't take kindly to being raised just to be harvested.
If it's harvested illegally, the donor or the donor's next-of-kin can get paid. Otherwise under present US law they can't. Getting paid would motivate people to donate who would not otherwise donate.
Thus, illegally harvesting good tissue for transplant makes excellent economic sense and would save lives. Unfortuntely, since the transaction is illegal, contract law doesn't apply and it's hard to get a positive reputation without getting caught. It's a shame that legislators are so willing to make laws that obviously cause the death of innocent people, and that voters are stupid enough to tolerate that behavior.
I'm a healthy young guy, and let's say I need money badly so I decide to sell one of my kidneys to the highest bidder. I can still live perfectly healthy with one kidney left.
I would be arrested because this is illegal! Why? Because Big Brother decided it was unethical to sell organs? Because fundamentalist Christians would be offended? Or Greenpeace and ACLU thought sanctity of human life should not be for sale? What exactly is the deal here?
The kind of sleazy dealings mentioned in TFA come about precisely because organ selling is a black market. So what exactly is the almighty government protecting us from?
for a broken spine. The very first thing they said was they wanted to use cadaver bone for the fusion. I said "HELL NO. HELL NO." and for good measure I threw in a few extra "HELL NO."s
There was no way they could prove to my satisfaction that the material would be totally clean and disease free. It wasn't going to happen. They would find a different way or I would do without the surgery.
That really torqued off the doctors, they acted all insulted that I would even suggest something like that but it's my body and I had the final say so.
They ended up taking some of the broken bone fragments and grinding them up then mixing them with some sort of bone growth solution to make a sort of gritty paste, like mortar in bricks. They filled in the mixture between the vertebrae and joined them with titanium rods and bolts to hold it all in place while the vertebrae fuse into one large piece. The metal stays in forever.
I know another guy that had a similar operation and but they used cadaver bone in him. He contracted Hepatitis C from the donor. What a wonderful gift to receive eh?
If you have to have surgery and have the option to avoid receiving anything donated, avoid it at all costs. I was lucky that I had the option to choose.
I have no regrets what so ever for taking the cautious road.
Sometimes it pays to be paranoid.
China is already selling the prgans of thousands of executed prisoners a year. The US and most of the rest of the developed world, are losing jobs rapidly, and thanks to Moore's Law, the entire world may be very hard to find work in in 20 or 30 years from now. Everything - housing, food, clean water, breathable air, electricity, clothing, are commodities that must be paid for, whether the purchaser has an income or not. Unless you have gobally scarce skills in 20 or 30 years - which will be rare, robots will do your job better than you ever could.. And far cheaper.. Seriously.. So what's so scary about organ selling? Perhaps kind of a reverse mortgage.. You get a few years of living high on the hog, eating real food.. drinking clean water.. away from the maddening crowds, as it were.. then it comes time to pay up.. -slice- Actually, I think the likelihood of something like this is extremely high.. Just follow the trends a few years into the future.. I hear that state and federal governments are already charging prison inmates for everything associated with their stays.. What's so different about this? Its supply and demand.. the magic of the marketplace..
Odd that the article doesn't mention the high-profile body-part-snatching case that made the news a couple months back--the cancerous bones of renowned news commentator and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke were removed and sold for transplanting. That case more than any other is probably what brought the practice to media attention.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The concept of illicitly harvesting and selling organs for profit -- called 'organlegging' -- was put forth in Larry Niven's 'Gil the ARM' stories (a collection of which was published in 1976). This was long before Mr. Cook published any of his popular novels.t m
Reference: http://www.larryniven.org/nivenisms_in_the_news.h
Nonsense. Just grow them all up in a controlled environment with no link to the outside world. Make them all think they are the last surviving human colony on Earth. Make up some story about a near-extinction from a disease or whatever. Rig some sort of "lottery" where a certain organ donor clone will be made to believe they are leaving the facility to have a chance at recolonizing the planet, when in fact their original host requires an organ transplant.
What could go wrong?
Dr. Frankenstein: [shouts] Igor!, Igor! Come here! Where is that boy? I need the brain for the Monster.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Let me put it this way. Charity is all well and good, of course, but who are you to tell me that I have no right to sell my organs to some rich dude(s) in need of a transplant, if I want to? I can see objection to government funding, in whole or in part or directly or indirectly, of such matters, but...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Part of the problem is the current system for donating organs. Most organ donor cards, or license endorsements, are a blank check for the removal of organs and tissues. I will not sign such a card because it is incompatible with my religious beliefs, which do permit organ donation when there is a specific and immediate need, but prohibit the strip-mining of the body for organs and tissues that might be useful to someone.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If a well-known investigative journalist appears to turn into a stttering moron, blipverts cause people to explode, and pirate analog TV becomes fashionable, then you are five and a half seconds into the future in a Max Headroom-like Dark Future where all "donor tissue" is from pirated sources. No questions asked.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Very insightful comment -- tissue donation is one of the most altruistic (and underrated) things one can do for society. However, I had a chance to see an organ procurement procedure while shadowing, and it really turns your stomach to see physicians rummage through the body looking for spare parts (i.e.:
"On my 3rd year surgery rotation at about 2am one night we had a harvest of an 8yo boy killed in a car accident (he was riding his bike). It was awful, everyone came in and just took what they wanted like it was some sort of morbid shopping trip. The transplant resident was 5 months pregnant at the time and when we were almost at the end she started crying, which set me and the anesthesia resident crying. It was just us and the nurses in there, all crying for the little boy as we closed. It was so awful, and I'm just glad that I'll be dead when they harvest my organs. And this might be weird, but I secretly hope that someone cries for me as they're closing." Quote
I'm all for organ donation, but honestly, it can be quite sad.
For once, offshore outsourcing hurts those at the other side of the pond.
Table-ized A.I.
What, no goatse jokes about ass transplants? Slashdotters are slipping of late.
Table-ized A.I.
There are very few religions that forbid organ donation. In fact, several branches of Christianity and Judaism actually encourage their followers to donate organs, and in Muslim culture charity towards others is considered to be almost a requirement. The only real problem is the millions of "not practicing" Christians/Jews/Muslims who have somehow developed the idea that it's ok not to go to church, but that donating their organs will get them sent to hell. It's ignorance that's the problem, NOT religion (for once).
An economic analysis on the sale of human organs.
6000 Americans will die this year because of the lack of available organs. A (regulated) market could ensure this doesn't occur.
They're not just for breakfast anymore.
I'll need $500, a case of beer, and about 15 minutes to clean the rust off the scissors. Oh, and a ride to the nearest Humane Society office; my car's on the frtz. No, don't read the fine-print on that liability waiver, just sign.
Cue Breughal and Mahler.
(Ob genius TV show reference - explanation mostly to make sure the bogofilter doesn't get me.)
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Why not pass out organ-donor cards in Church? If the Pope were to order all churches to do a sermon on it once a month, and give the cards to anyone who's interested, it would make it clear to everyone that the church not only endorses, but encourages organ donation. That would make a bigger difference than any ammount of government spending on advertisements and educational programs.
One of my current co-workers used to work there and told me they sell the excess or unsuitable blood to comsetic companies for use in protein shampoos and such.
I'm guessing, but I very strongly doubt it, for two reasons:
(a) Anything extracted from a human is a potential biohazard. It would be really dumb to deal with all the extra red tape and limited supply of human blood (because there won't be a consistent oversupply) to your shampoos when you could just use something like pig blood.
(b) I remember seeing a "Pantene Pro-V" commercial which showed 3d-rendered pills flowing into someone's hair as the narrator talked about healthy hair. Your hair is dead. I assure you, vitamins and minerals and protein and whatnot are not going to improve its health any more than spreading a little lemon juice over the corpse of your Uncle Edward is going to bring him back to life. If you were taking vitamin *pills* to try to help out the hair follicules, that might be a different story. If some shampoo company wants to laud the imaginary wonders of dumping nutrients on your hair, they probably aren't going to go to any more effort than they absolutely have to -- they're going to get some sort of industrial byproduct that contains protein (like plant husks or seeds or something).
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
As I tried to imply in the post, a financial market in organs can create a situation where murder or GBH for organs is profitable while a charitable system does not. A lot more people die every day than need organs so if a reasonable percentage of people donate organs it's likely a match will turn up soon.
In my country we recently had people convicted for killing the unemployed and hiding their bodies to take their government benefits (as the joke goes - come to Australia and have barrels of fun!). If there was a market in body parts people would be killed for those too and bribes would be paid to get unidentifed corpses into the system - so yes, if I was in government in Australia I would try to stop you selling your body parts to rich people - but in a country without much in the way of organ donation it would have to be a different story due to a lack of organs.
I owns myself, and I's worth seven thousand dollars!
They're much tastier, too!
...
Don't, it was horrible.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
They just pretend to pick you up for some casual sex, but then when you fall asleep in the hotel they perform surgery, snatch your kidneys, and into the bathtub full of ice you go... It's true! This happened to a friend of someone who sent me an email....
If there was a market in body parts people would be killed for those too and bribes would be paid to get unidentifed corpses into the system
You are correct that it would make it easier to put illegitimate organs into legitimate circulation (which is already a problem as per TFA), but there is already a market for body parts--it just happens to be illegal. If it were a regulated market, rather than an underground one, it would be much safer. Furthermore, the cost of body parts would go down if it were legal, since the risk associated with it decreases supply. While perhaps more people would voluntarily elect to donate organs who shouldn't, there is no doubt that fewer people would have their organs illegally taken than are today. Making a market illegitimate doesn't eliminate it; it simply increases the crime associated with it, like Prohibition or the War on Drugs.
There are two other good arguments against legalizing the sale of organs: that a price shouldn't be put on such things (which seems odd since we already put a price on medicine), and that there would be greater social inequity regarding who received organ transplants. While the latter concern is certainly valid, there would nonetheless be more organs donated overall, and more lives saved, even if it were skewed more towards the rich. It seems to me that it would be better to adopt some system and perhaps impose additional government regulation in order to ameliorate this, rather than to support a system under which more people die in a more democratic fashion.
English is easier said than done.
I know what you mean man. Every time I go for a job interview it's the same thing. "You have the right qualifications and experience, but our integrated circuits are just too, too complex. I'm afraid you'll have to flip burgers somewhere else. I'm sorry, it's hitting us all very hard."
They are selling his bodyparts for thousands of years.
-- okki nothing more to say
It is saving peoples lives, and dead people realy don't need their bodies anymore do they?
Do you care to post some evidence, or are you just a dickhead?
Since none of the posters that have replied to this seem to be aware of the fact:
Nationstates is a game where you play as a government, or a head of state, or maybe just the whole nation (it's not really specified). You are given 'issues' once or twice a day, and depending on the choice you make, you change the way you're nation is described. Also, it takes a very satirical view of just about everything.
Alistair Cooke is famous in Britain for the radio programme, "Letter from America". He did this programme for over 50 years, and only stopped a few weeks before he died. This 20 minute (IIRC) radio show was always +5, Insightful (and is missed by many).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm shocked that Rush, Oreilly, and Savage haven't jumped on the Turkish movie about Americans stealing organs from Iraqi prisoners... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4700154.s tm
But I guess after soooo many movies where every Arab is a terrorist, I guess turnabout is fair play.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
But his main genre was time travel stories, such as the popular "Time and Again" :)
--Mike
(side tangent)
Fresh meat is always more expensive. Think sushi vs. fish sticks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thank you for having the honesty and integrity to speak truthfully without beating around the bush, watering down your words with euphemisms, or otherwise cow-towing to those who beat the drum of political correctness.
PC is a means by which unpleasant realities are obscured. It does not do anyone any favors because doing the linguistic equivalent of sweeping something under the rug does not make it go away. It is a deeply flawed idea at best, and at worst a far more serious social ill than anything it is nominally supposed to help solve because it is guaranteed to make whatever it is applied to worse.
It would be nice if more people had the courage to tell the PC nazis where to shove their crap instead of allowing themselves to be browbeat. I think America would be a better place. All of the bigotry and prejudice that most people are so careful to tip-toe around would be subject to the light of day. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. When something is openly acknowledged it can be dealt with. When it is hidden away its influence persists wihout ever being addressed. You would think that people would understand this. But then again 50% of the population is of below average intelligence.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It's like elephant ivory. I happen to come across a corpose of an elephant that unfortunately died of natural causes (lead poisoning), scouts honour, guv'nor, and I harvested these 4 suspiciously fresh tusks from it. As I said, the animal was already dead when I got there, so can I have my cash now?
Can't imagine why they wanted to completely ban it.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
My grandmother has been waiting for a new kidney for about three years. Fortunately dialysis still works for her and her kidneys aren't completely non-functional yet. However if I could buy a kidney for her, I'd be very tempted.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's that simple. One could of course argue that 5 speakers with a good sophisticated software that produce just as good output would be more profit if sold at the same price, but let's imagine this scene at Best Buy:
"So, this system here has 5 speakers and this here has 7?"
"Yes sir"
"And they cost the same?"
"Yes sir"
"So why should I buy the one with 5, think I'm stupid or what? I can get more for the same price!"
The unfortunate truth. People don't care about quality, they care about quantity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
how much stolen, 'recycled' and counterfeit stuff is floating around the medical supplies market.
When people are capable of counterfeiting aircraft hardware and putting hundreds in danger, why wouldn't they pursue similar profit margins in a much more loosely regulated industry, say tissue trade? It's enough to make me want a bunch of nanoscale robots with tiny weapons floating around in my body. I mean one never knows when one might be subject to violation via the warez of these body partz and medical supplies sleezoids.
In the USA you have both a powerful government and a very large proportion of the population as church going individuals who should at least be theoretically disposed towards charity. Once you rule out the merchants in the temple, the ones that believe that God hates poor people, and cults designed to make money you still have a lot of potential donors out there that should be willing to help others once they pass on. Countries with large agnostic populations manage to do it.
I would also expect a comprehensive library featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke!
2. Shoot recipient
3. Steal kidney from corpse
4. Reimplant kidney in self
5. Go to step 1
Voila! An endless source of cash.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
What the hell...facing 25 years?! Thats it? I think on top of all the forgery, fraud, and quite honestly absolute disgusting disregard for the families of the deceased, they should face criminal charges for every single individual that has problems with the stolen tissues. For example, if the guy from TFA really did pick up Hep A from the stolen tissue, they should face charges of deliberalty infecting him. They should also face murder charges for anyone who happens to die as a result of tissue rejection.
This sort of thing disgusts me so much. That humanity is even capable of going to these levels for greed is pathetic. Nevermind the lawyers that can insist they did nothing illegal, and still sleep at night. Pathetic and disgusting. People like this really should just be removed from the gene pool.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
For charities, it would involve either bribing/donating to/threatening the people who decide how the list is sorted.
A situation like that ends up being just like Congress, and we can all see where that's gotten us...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Not like you'll be using your body when it's dead.
What about the blood?? You felt safer receiving that from another person??
Niven's early Known Space books, about Gil the ARM are the ones to read. In them, after they found the ultimate anti-rejection meds, everyone could get anything replaced. Before you knew it, they started having criminals executed in hospitals, so they could be harvested for the organ banks. But then there weren't enough parts, so more and more crimes were punished with death. Before you knew it, that wasn't enough either, so that's where the organleggers came in, kidnapping people to harvet their organs.
From the New Jersey paper which is close to the invesigation:
a se/news-2/113903194211860.xml&coll=1
(you need to pop in your date of birth, just lie)
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/b
It is illegal in US to sell body parts — they can only be donated, which, of course, is too much trouble for most people to consider.
People wait for transplants for years, and many die without receiving one. If it were possible for people to receive money for their or their (recently deceased) relatives' organs, these tradings wouldn't need to endanger the recipients with stuff of questionable quality.
Too bad, the electorate is so irrational on this issue, and spooked by urban myths of kidney thieves, etc...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm not talking about cloning whole bodies, for one that's too expense, two, it takes too long, and three, it's unethical. Instead you do some teaking, create some stem cells, then use a matrix to just grow whatever you need. It could be a heart, liver, or lung, skin and bone are easy. Replacement blood vessels.
I don't read AC A human right
the movie "Dirty Pretty Things" http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dirty_pretty_thing s
Sad, but not surprising, to see this kind of thing already happening.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
I've heard that in France, Spain and some other European countries, being an organ donor is the default. You have to "opt out" if you don't want to, similarly to the way we in the U.S. have to "opt in" if we do.
As a result, I've heard that Spain is actually a net exporter of organs.
Most people don't really care one way or the other about it; if you ask "do you want to be a donor?", they ask why they would want to do that. If you as "do you not want to be a donor?", they ask why they wouldn't want to do that.
Would you opt out just because you are not being paid for it?
Read "The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton" (a compendium of stories with that them published just a few years ago).
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
This is a particularly vicious slur, given the history of antisemitic blood libels [CC] against the Jews.
:-)
[shrug] Most of the griping I hear about Jewish nastiness is claims of power-brokering, which certainly is the case WRT our support of Israel.
That being said, I have a couple of not-insanely-wealthy Jewish friends, and none of *them* have ever set up illegal arms deals or anything.
I think the griping is less to do with Jews as a religion or culture, and more as shorthand for "rich and powerful", since you have a strong Jewish banking industry and a group of people that are wealthy and powerful and also happen to be Jewish. I'm sure that xenophobia ties into it in some parts of the world.
In the US, the kind of unhappiness with people like Cheney would probably translate to unhappiness with Jews in some other parts of the world. [shrug]
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I refuse anonymous donations of anything going into my body. This also includes bio-engineered body parts like pig and mouse freakshow parts. No animal parts, no thanks.
Why not? I mean, I can understand, say, if you didn't like immunosuppressants. But as for disgusting...I mean, it's just flesh. When the industry grows a turkey-in-a-box with legs that can't support itself and you eat it, your body converts that into your new flesh.
I don't think that you're entitled to not have the transplants if you don't want them, but it just seems kind of weird. I can't imagine choosing death over having a body that couldn't have been created a hundred years ago.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Can't skin be tested for any problems? With a bloodtest we can already get a lot of information about the current condition of our body. DNA also tells a lot about our body. Skin tissue must contain such elements too, not?
Maybe this list of dissaprovals could be shortened because there are so many more factors to keep a body healthy or sick. The same for skin and organs. Not every man on Earth lives the same; thank-whatever-outthere. My foodrythm sucks, if there is any anyways, but I am as healthy as I can be; which could affect my skin too, while all tests show up ok. Someone who used (once) drugs, doesn't need to be affected either. Such question-list is putting someone on a spot as "1" or "0", either it's yes or no; isn't that a little bit too over the top; when tainted skin is actively used?
How can such tissue be "imported" into a hospital without the donor being tested? Does a fake report gets included with the skin? A fake bloodtest and/or DNA test?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
A good while back I remember reading that the chemicals and parts contained within the human body all together were worth a value of under a dollar (I think somewhere in the area of 30 something cents.) It does a body good to know that today we're worth more than ever before. ^_^
-Wasn't there a movie about this? M-M-M-M-Max Headroom!
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Thank you hunterx, well said.
Can someone put me in touch with a good lawyer in Virginia?
-Clio
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