This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Is the human body sacred? Or is it a commodity ready to be chopped up and exposed to the forces of supply and demand? The answer is a matter of perspective. Our own body is a temple. But when we need a spare part, suddenly we're surprisingly open to a transaction. To a person looking for a kidney, a scientist trying to learn anatomy, a beauty-parlour customer looking for the perfect hair do, there's no substitute for a piece of someone else.
The problem is, demand for replacement flesh grossly outstrips supply. In the UK and like-minded countries, it's illegal to sell body parts -- they can be taken only from those who filled in a donor card before they died or who, alive, are willing to give up an organ out of sheer benevolence. This means there isn't enough tissue to go around. So, as with any outlawed or heavily regulated resource, a bustling underground trade has formed.
Sometimes the market in body parts is exploitative: desperate people are paid tiny sums for huge donations. Other times it is ghoulish: pieces are stolen from the recently dead. And every so often, the resource grab is lethal - people are simply killed for their organs. Welcome to the red market...
1. BLOOD
Price: India (per pint) £16 / US (per pint) $337
Description: Until the 70s, for-profit blood-collection centres were located in almost every poor US neighbourhood, somewhat like payday-loan centres are today. This changed after a study showed that paid donations encouraged lax standards. The rules were modified and, as in the UK, blood and organs can no longer be sold. In the developing world, however, there are still profits to be made. In 2008, blood thieves in India were arrested for keeping people prisoner and milking their blood up to three times a week. Some captives had been held for more than two years.
Source: Legal: Blood donors / Illegal: Paid blood donors, blood farms
**2. HAIR
Price:** £350: Average UK retail (for a set of extensions)Description: Every year, hundreds of tonnes of hair are given to the Lord Venkateswara at the Tirumala temple in south India. The temple sells these donations to the West, where they become raw material for the hair-extension industry. Indian hair is valued for its length and the fact that the average Indian doesn't use damaging products. The temple makes the equivalent of about £7 million a year in sales, which translates to hundreds of millions at the salon level. There are also secondary markets for human hair. Lesser manes, for example, are sent to factories and boiled down into enzymes that help soften the dough of many baked goods.
Source: Legal: Indian temples, donations, direct sales / Illegal: N/A
3. CORNEAS
Price: $24,400: Implanted (in the US)Description: Corneas are relatively easy to transplant and easy to ship. This makes for a brisk international market, and cryo packages zip across the globe to needy eyeballs everywhere. In the UK, there is a shortage of corneas; in the US, donation rates exceed demand, so the country is a net exporter. Elsewhere, the market is far from orderly. In 2001, a former Chinese surgeon testified before the US Congress that he had harvested hundreds of corneas (along with kidneys and skin) from more than 100 executed Chinese prisoners. The UN has discussed trying to put an end to international organ brokering, but so far the global market remains unregulated.
Source: Legal: Diseased donors / Illegal:
Mortuaries
4. HEARTS
Price: Legal: £642,000 / Illegal:
76,500Description: Black-market heart transplants are extremely rare, if only because putting in a new ticker requires a state-of-the- art medical facility, and these tend to be highly fastidious about organ donation. Although one hospital manager in Saudi Arabia told Wired that there was a black market for transplants in that country, there is no evidence of an actual operation ever taking place. The few known nonconsensual donations that do occur once again tend to come from Chinese prisoners, according to the UN.Source: Legal: Deceased donors / Illegal: Chinese prisoners
5. LIVERS
Price: Legal: £360,000 / Illegal: £101,000Description: The liver is amazingly resilient; even a badly damaged one can fully regenerate on its own. But when there's an excessive buildup of scar tissue, a person will need a transplant. The good news is that a patient may not need a whole new organ: because of the liver's fortitude, just a healthy lobe may be enough. This means living donors are possible. The bad news is that, for the living donor, recovery can be excruciating, so donors aren't common. Executed Chinese prisoners are one source of black-market livers. Or brokers can set you up in the Philippines, where illicit donations are likely to come from those desperate for cash.Source: Legal: Living donors, deceased donors / Illegal:
Executed prisoners, Filipino slum-dwellers
6. KIDNEYS
Price: India: £9,750 / China: £40,000 / US: $262,900
Description: In both the UK and the US, patients often face a long wait for a new kidney. Finding an international source is easy, though a kidney's origin can be difficult to discern. According to a Council of Europe report, for example, a clinic with ties to senior Kosovo officials engaged in an organ- harvesting ring as recently as 2008. And in China, an investigation found that people on death row are routinely tested, typed and held for on-demand "donations". Then there are India, Pakistan and Indonesia, where slum-dwellers are lured into selling their innards for a pittance.
Source: Legal: Living donors, deceased donors /
Illegal: Paid donors, executed prisoners
7. EGGS
Price: £6,000: Per IVF cycle (in the UK)Description: Egg donation is legal in the UK, but getting one (or more) is going to cost you in fees and hospital charges.
That said, would-be buyers can also look abroad for deals. Cyprus is one destination with a burgeoning illegal trade in human eggs.
Clinics there have flown in impoverished women from Russia and Ukraine for aggressive egg harvesting, returning them before complications can arise. The deal can save a client up to 40 per cent on in vitro fertilisation services. Other egg- harvesting programmes in Romania, Spain and Israel offer similar deals.
Source: Legal: Egg donors / Illegal: Egg sellers
8. WOMB RENTALS
Price: India: £12,500-19,500 / US: $80,000-150,000Description: India -- the outsourcing capital of the world -- is the go-to place for getting someone else to grow you a child. Tucked away in an industrial dairy town in Gujarat, for example, the Akanksha Infertility Clinic offers a complete surrogacy programme for just £15,000 -- a fraction of what people pay in the West. The clinic achieves a surprisingly high success rate by transferring five or six embryos to women who sign up for the programme (sometimes resulting in sets of twins and the prenatal developmental complications they entail) and by keeping the surrogates on lockdown for the nine months that they gestate.Source: Legal: Fertility clinics / Illegal: Fertility clinics
9. PLASTINATES
Price: £29,400-49,900 per body
Description: In the late 70s, Gunther von Hagens revolutionised the study of anatomy by changing the way specimens were prepared. Instead of immersing dead bodies in a preservative, he replaced their fat and water with polymer, turning corpses into plastic statues. Plastination exposed the body's internal structures and greatly enhanced researchers' ability to study them.
It also led to several travelling exhibitions. An investigation into those revealed that many bodies were likely to have come from executed prisoners.Source: Legal: Donated corpses / Illegal: Chinese prisoners
10. LIGAMENTS AND BONES
Price: £4,500 for an ACL (knee-ligament) reconstructionDescription: Most organs become useless soon after the owner dies. The key exceptions are ligaments and bone. In the US, funeral parlours have been implicated in stealing these less-perishable body parts and selling them without permission to tissue banks. Between 2004 and 2005, for example, a company named Biomedical Tissue Services illicitly harvested 244 bodies from Philadelphia mortuaries. Since tissue banks are not set up to monitor whether parts come from fraudulent sources, it is difficult to know how many donation recipients carry contraband inside their bodies.Source: Legal: Deceased donors / Illegal: Mortuaries
11. SKIN
Price: £1 per square cmDescription: If a burn or an ulcer leaves a hole in your body that's too big to stitch, the best option is to patch it up with extra skin -- preferably your own. In a pinch, however, someone else's will do. There aren't a lot of people willing to donate living skin, so most grafts are taken from dead bodies -- either legally from organ donors or, like ligaments and bone, illegally from funeral parlours. The danger of corpse harvesting is that the skin is not always as sanitary as it should be. In the Biomedical Tissue Services case, workers hacked at body after body without washing their hands, sending potentially infected samples to tissue banks.Source: Legal: Deceased donors / Illegal: Mortuaries
12. SKELETONS
Price: £1,900-3,500Description: There was a time when every doctor in training received a full set of human bones along with their first-year textbooks. These bones usually came from Calcutta, which produced almost 60,000 skeletons a year. But in 1985 the practice of exporting human parts was banned, and there aren't a lot of good, legal sources of medical skeletons any more. Today, black-market skeletons pilfered from graves in India are cleaned in acid baths, smuggled out of the country and sold at a premium through brokers in Canada and Europe.Source: Legal: Donated cadavers / Illegal: Indian graves
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
