Slashdot Mirror
Organs of UK Nuclear Workers Secretly Harvested; Energy Secretary Apologizes
fernlyn writes with word of a report detailing a decades-long practice of clandestine post-mortem organ removal from the bodies of dozens of workers in the UK's nuclear energy industry; Britain's Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has apologized to the families of those workers whose organs were taken without consent or even acknowledgement. Many of the organs taken were removed without any apparent forensic purpose in mind. Surviving relatives are understandably upset with what they see as cavalier treatment of their loved ones' bodies (even beyond unauthorized organ removal), such as the replacement of bones with lengths of broomstick.
Anyone who has been remotely connected with the British civil service will understand that, unlike even the United States in an increasingly dwindling number of areas, there is no real sense of government serving the people. The government exists to manage the unwashed masses and knows what is good for you, even while every individual understands that the government is really serving itself. This notion of nanny leadership is even woven into the undergraduate experience at Oxford, where the nation's managers are bred (and probably Cambridge too): if you have any sense of egalitarianism, it is repulsive but difficult to ignore.
It makes a difference to a lot of people.
Have you ever seen what they do to bodies in an autopsy?
No sig today...
Property rights.
Your body is your most important piece of property. If the government can just go around "cavalierly" doing whatever it wants with your body, how can one say that they live in a just society?
were replaced with lengths of broomstick?
It makes no difference when your dead if your organs are in a jar, cremated, or rotting in the earth.
Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral? Given what you just wrote you wont object to that right?
It's about the living; and respect; doofus.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
the dead cannot own property.
http://www.SachaWheeler.com
Actually in the bible it specifies that as much as possible and as intact as possible of the body has to be buried.
For that reason when there is a suicide attack in israel you see orthodox jews arrive to gather all bits of the victims to ensure compliance to the 'law of god'.
And there are certain christian wings that either used to adhere or still do adhere to that biblical stipulation.
But many christian forgot all about it though.
But even when not religious it's a freaking asshole thing to do and unlawful to boot, and there is the question why they would remove organs and bones and then destroy them, from workers in nuclear facilities.. you do the math.
Only three things are certain in life. Death, taxes, and getting your organs harvested by the government.
Organs and bones are harvested (and bones replaced by lengths of broomstick or pvc pipe). Due care is taken for these organs and they're being used to save lives, which is arguably better than just throwing them away.
The dark side of the whole thing is that a corpse is worth roughly GBP 200k-300k in spare parts, so ethics are out of the window and organs are harvested without the consent of the deceased nor those who stayed behind.
As usual, money is the driving factor here, so there is something you can do to stop this practice if you have objections to it: Sign up as organ donor. If there are enough organ donors, the law of supply and demand will take care of the rest and make sure this practice is no longer profitable, so it will cease to exist.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
It makes no difference when your dead if your organs are in a jar, cremated, or rotting in the earth.
Maybe it makes no difference to you when you are dead, but a whole lot of people in this world have quite strong feelings about the right way to treat a persons body once they are deceased, and rational or not, those feelings are very real and should be respected.
To take what you said to the ridiculous, if one of your kids died and the doctor cut them into pieces, removed the contents of their head, and used it like a puppet, would you be upset? I would be, and upset is putting it very lightly.
"Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral?"
Not really. They're dead, why would I care?
With all due respect, I believe you are being dishonest for the sake of argumentation. Feelings towards loved ones don't just magically disappear at the moment of death.
Unless you don't have any feelings to begin with, which is still a possibility. By being a psychopath, for instance.
The summary makes us think that "Many of the organs taken were removed without any apparent forensic purpose in mind."; In fact, "The organs were examined at Sellafield as part of research into the health effects of work in the industry"
As much as it was a cabal of ghoulish bodysnatchers with God complexes who thought they were above the law. You know, typical medics. 99.5% of them give the rest a bad name.
And I re-iterate my position: if criminal acts were performed, individuals should be prosecuted. If the relatives are going to sue anyone for anything (what? emotional distress?) then it should be the individuals, not the State. The State doesn't care if it has to rob Peter a bit more to hush up Paul.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
From TFA:
Ironically, had they been properly informed some would have agreed to the removal and analysis of the organs.
I would say yes, iIf someone asked me: "We think that staring at a computer screen reading Slashdot all day might be unhealthy. Would you mind if we grab a few of your organs when you die? This might lead us to better protection for Slashdot readers in the future." Harvesting organs without permission is just plain rude, crude and uncalled for. It's just not cricket; whatever happened to the image of the polite English gentleman?
Maybe they didn't ask because they were afraid that it would scare workers away, because of health safety concerns? But if the UK nuclear industry had doubts about health safety, the workers should have been informed about that, as well.
What other shenanigans are going on, which haven't been discovered yet . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Judging from your name, you don't mind if someone pees on you while you're alive, either.
My property goes to my heirs at my death. My body is my property. Stealing bits of my body is stealing from my heirs. No mystical crap required.
If the government chooses to take my body at time of death then it's a tax or confiscation of property from the heirs but the government generally has to disclose taxes or confiscations.
If the dead voted, they would be able to own property.
"His name was James Damore."
Nice use of the word 'harvesting' to set the mood.
Unless specified otherwise, in Belgium each person is a donor of his body parts after he or she dies.
Next of kin do not have to be forewarned that some or even all of the body is used as donor, but sometimes are.
So all bodies are 'harvested' by default.
I personally do not care what happens to my body after I died. It's not my problem anymore. Let people who care at that moment do whatever they feel will help them to mourn or celebrate.
I do like the 'harvest by default' idea, as long as it easy to opt out AND if opting out would mean that you would opt out of receiving any donor organ as well. You will NOT be placed on any list. This would give people who ARE willing to be donor a better chance of receiving in case of need.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
When did we start excusing governments and other authority figures from law? The US president is ordered to hand over emails, and he apologizes and "loses" them. The Catholic church is accused of covering up years of sexual child abuse, and the Pope apologizes. The British government steals organs and desecrates corpses, and someone apologizes.
How about giving these people the same consequences as if it was one of us "normal" people doing these acts? Are you trying to imply that we wouldn't have the full weight of the law fall on us? Are you saying we could get away with just saying "I'm sorry?". This has to stop, it's the path to despotism.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"How dare you take the organs out, they were supposed to feed the worms".
There may not be a good logical rationale to keep a dead body intact, but there are religious reasons.
For a religious person, a deceased body desecrated might mean a deceased soul spending eternity in hell as opposed to heaven. Which, in their believes, would be a very negative emotional situation.
I'm not religious, like many others on Slashdot, but that does not mean we get to decide how religious people should feel or what they should believe in, just like religious people shouldn't be allowed to tell others what to feel and believe. Even if we could, we wouldn't be very succesfull.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Is your friend an undergraduate or graduate student? I'd lay a small wager that it is the former in your case.
The undergraduate degree I read over a decade ago (BA in Computation - anywhere else this would be a BSc in Computer Science) was indeed a very mediocre course (and there were only two lecturers that were any good, though most of my tutors - those who conducted tutorials consisting of two students at a time - were very good); but to be perfectly honest most undergraduate programmes in CS in existence are rather mediocre (I can't speak for other disciplines).
The key thing is the quality of research undertaken in the University - this is certainly world-class in most disciplines (which impacts those reading higher degrees by research). This probably won't impact you much if you were reading an undergraduate degree, though.
I can't agree that the "majority of students who go there are considered 'mediocre'," though. The vast majority of people I knew (which is significantly more than your one friend) were intelligent and articulate. This is what tends to happen when you have a selection system which requires applicants to hold extremely high academic grades (three A grades at UK A-level, or if you are from the US a score of 2,100/2,400 in the SAT reasoning test or an ACT score of 32/36), and then go through an interview-based selection.