Slashdot Mirror
The Real Body Snatchers
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC are reporting on a grisly trade lying behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous "dealers" will procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them — e.g., undertakers, medics — and will process them for resale onto legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000. Now, who says I'm worth more alive than dead?"
In his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) Larry Niven speculated that once organ transplants were common, the government would end up making everything, even jaywalking, merit the death penalty to insure a good supply of organs. China has already started using organs from executed prisoners, how long before it spreads to India and even the West?
On the other hand, Niven did foresee an end to organlegging with the rise of alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs"). Of course, in Niven's timeline that only happened in A Gift from Earth (republished in Three Books of Known Space IIRC), after hundreds of years of murders for organs, but we're already seeing exciting reports in tech news of progress in artificial parts, so maybe the barbarity of e.g. China's treatment of prisoners will pass fairly soon.
Yup, you're worth a lot of money dead. To everyone but you. Imagine if _you_ had the right to decide to sell your corpse for a profit, the good you could do: You could leave that money to your family, donate it to charities. You could also do wonders to eliminate the organ donor waiting list -- if, presumably, you could directly sell your organs to folks willing to pay for them.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
"Stiff" by Mary Roach. Goes into extensive detail about just how many uses dead bodies have. A few: forensics (letting them decay and recording what sorts of insects colonize them and when, which gives immense amounts of data to people who are trying to analyze time-of-death, also covered extensively in "A Fly For The Prosecution" by Madison Goff, and other books.
Safety testing: putting corpses in cars and crashing them gives much better results on skull fractures and such than Buster The Dummy. Likewise, dropping corpses in elevators or off buildings into safety nets, or measuring the protective qualities of bullet-proof jackets. It's hard to get good results using pigs.
(I saw Mary Roach read from this book one time, and it was creepy, not because of her and the book, but because just about everyone in the audience ended up asking really detailed, scary questions about treatment of dead bodies, since apparently most of them had experience in the subject.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.