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Brain Death and Neo-Cannibalism
"Selling Body Parts Is Big
Business: But nowhere in the country are grieving families told that the
cadavers they donate fuel a fast-growing industry predicted to hit $1 billion
within three years", by Mark Katches, William Heisel, and Ronald Campbell,
The Orange County Register, reported in The Providence Sunday Journal, April 16,
2000, p. A-1, 24.
"American businesses make hundreds of millions of
dollars selling products crafted from donated human bodies, even though it is
illegal to profit from cadaver parts, an Orange County Register investigation
found. Cadaver skin puffs up the lips of fashion models at $1,050 a shot.
Dentists use ground bone about 200,000 times a year to treat their patients.
Glossy catalogs advertise 650 products made from body parts."
"A single dead body yields raw materials worth
tens of thousands of dollars to businesses whose stock is traded on Wall Street
and to nonprofit agencies that obtain the parts for them ... Nowhere in the
country are grieving families told that their gifts fuel a fast-growing industry
predicted to hit $1 billion within three years. Neither are millions of
people who indicate on their driver's licenses their willingness to donate body
parts."
"`People who donate have no idea that tissue is
being processed into products that, per gram or per ounce, are in the price
range of diamonds' ... The products enhance millions of lives, according to
industry trade groups. Cadaver tendons help athletes return to the playing
field. Slings crafted from human skin solve bladder troubles. Corneas prepared
for implant allow the blind to see. About 20,000 dead Americans became part of
this manufacturing cycle last year, four times the number of bodies used for
vital-organ transplants."
"Organs can only be harvested from donors who are
brain dead but whose heart and other organs are still functioning ... The tissue
trade now generates about $500 million dollars annually. `There is a profit',
said Michael Jeffries, chief financial officer for Osteotech, Inc., a leader in
the bone business. `It's not an evil thing because the profit is put to good
use." [p. A-1, 22]
Don't be fooled by the slick advertising designed to
appeal to your emotional side. "Families are led to believe they are giving
the gift of life. They are not told that skin goes to enlarge penises
or smooth out wrinkles, or that executives of tissue banks ... routinely earn
six-figure salaries. The products are rarely life-saving, as
advertised".
"After interviewing hundreds of people and
reviewing thousands of pages of documents, the newspaper found that donated
bodies follow one of two paths. They become further research subjects or
raw materials for medical products that are sold commercially for profit. It
is more likely that body parts will be made into products... A typical donor
produces $14,000 to $34,000 in sales ... But yields can be far greater.
Skins, tendons, and corneas are listed at about $110,000. Add bone from the
same body, and one cadaver can be worth about $220,000."
"The two largest for-profit companies in the
tissue industry recorded a combined $142.3 million in sales last year, and each
pays its chief executives more than $460,000 annually ... The nation's four
largest nonprofit tissue banks say they will generate a total of $261 million in
sales this year. And prices are rising."
Despite the fact that all these parts are donated
by the public, "Patients pay $2,400 for a cornea at San Francisco's Pacific
Eye Associates. The same eye center charged $1,000 four years ago. Osteotech's
trademark bone putty, used in spinal surgery, sells for $853 for 2 teaspoons --
about $100 more than in 1999... Costs can vary by hundreds or thousands of
dollars. An Achilles tendon at a Seattle bank sells for $865. Georgia's CryoLife
... charges $2,000 for the same product."
What kind of people (people?) are involved in this
macabre marketing of human body parts? Keep reading for even more shocking
revelations!
The following is from an article
entitled "Last Right," by Michael Henricott, found in Omni Magazine,
September 1987. It begins with the author watching a team of surgeons
"harvesting" the organs of a still-living 42-year-old man who
had been so severely injured by an aneurysm he had been declared
"Brain Dead", thus stripping him of all his normal rights to live:
"On his back, eyes shut,
breathing rhythmically, R.H. six three, 170 pounds, is a handsome man. Yet
even as one admires the strong lines of his body, surgeons with scalpels
incise the skin and muscle of his chest and abdomen with long, sure strokes.
Using a small electric saw, they cleave the sternum as easily as if it were
made of balsa. There is surprisingly little blood, but there's a certain
amount of dismay in the operating room (O.R.) when as many as eight doctors
have their hands and arms inside the cadaver, working quickly to disconnect
the organs from their many vessels."
After
the "harvest", the doctors quietly left the room, the last doctor
switching off the lights and respirator. Did any one of them care that they had
just killed a human being for the sole purpose of harvesting his organs for
profit?
Even Henricott makes a comment on the cold,
business-like demeanor of the doctors, then goes on to ponder the philosophical
reasoning that would allow this type of behavior to be readily accepted by the
general public.
After recalling how a so-called expert debunked the
Biblical definition of death as "heart stoppage", Henricott proceeds
to examine the new definitions of death, ranging from "Brain Death" to
"Lack of Awareness", terms deliberately chosen by organ harvesters
because they remove the human element, a technique used also by the Nazis in the
early years of the Holocaust.
Other terms organ harvesters are fond of using:
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Beating heart cadavers, or,
neo-morts
-
Biologically tenacious -- a
term used by Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
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Persistent Vegetative
State -- a term used for the comatose patient.
Next
Henricott turns to the "New Frontier" of Medicine -- the wholesale
selling of human body parts:
"I found that the future,
as they say, is already with us... A number of bioethicists, philosophers, and
M.D.'s are beginning to contemplate expanding the definition of death to
include people in persistent vegetative states, individuals who have lost
their intellect, memory, speech, and awareness of self or environment."
In other
words, they'd like to one day harvest organs from comatose patients as well.
After that, who knows what else they might have in mind. Their new concept of
death is termed "Cognitive Death", and its definition is,
unfortunately, very subjective rather than objective, leaving a wide loop-hole
for future alteration or expansion.
Henricott also
states that it is highly possibly that "human vegetable farms" may be
set up not only for harvesting organs, but much, much more! Listen:
"Many physicians foresee
the massive proliferation of 'Jefferson Institutes' (remember Coma? --
20kWeb) devoted to harvesting organs, from the vegetative 'dead'. There is no
end to possible scenarios. Female vegetatives, for example, might be employed
as surrogate wombs -- providing that endocrine balances could be reestablished
after the disruptions that often accompany profound brain damage. The
vegetatives could even be mated to produce fertilized eggs or offspring."
Mating
the dead with the dead? Now one can't help but wonder, if such a nightmarish
scenario should ever become a reality, just how many of those unfortunate
"offspring" would themselves be harvested for parts?
Even more important, in such a frightening future, just
how dead would anyone have to be for a "harvester" to declare them
"Cognitively dead?" We need not look into the future for the answer.
Listen and weep over the terrible words of Fred Plum, neurologist in chief at
Cornell University Medical College:
"I believe that the
meaning of life is cognition and self-awareness , not merely visceral
survival."
Henricott
continues:
"Over the next 20 years,
the overwhelming demand for organs may increase the pressure to simply declare
the 'brain absent' dead. There is already something of a black market for
buying and selling organs. If the cognitive-death definition were
instituted, organ-merchandising corporations might establish enterprises
beyond Wall Street's wildest insider fantasies. The world would find itself in
a situation where death itself would be an industry -- an economic
incentive and this economic pressure is not necessarily bad."
Not
necessarily bad? Even more shocking, Henricott suddenly begins to speak of
eating the dead! Listen to him quote the unbelievable words of Dr. Carelton
Gajdusek, a Nobel prize-winning virologist:
"...were it not for the
viral infection in the tissue, eating brains would have "provided a good
source of protein for a meat-starved community... With the great advances in
life-support technology and organ transplantation, the dead today do indeed
have much 'protein' to offer us -- in the form of their organs and body parts.
We are the neo-cannibals."
What Organ Harvesters Want Us to
Believe...
First, they tell us: "A
brain dead person will never be able to think or feel again."
And to the question, "Are
there any clinically documented cases where a patient was declared brain dead
and later restored to normal life?" they give the following answer:
"No. However, sometimes
television dramas perpetuate myths that people who've been declared dead from
severe brain trauma can suddenly awaken and recover completely. In real life,
that never happens. No brain dead person has ever regained consciousness.
"In cases in which a patient
does re-awaken, he was never actually brain dead. Instead, he was in a deep coma
or vegetative state with marginal brain activity.
"Once someone is brain dead,
he is legally dead. The brain will never recover. The respiratory support
equipment only keeps the heart beating, giving the appearance that the person is
alive."
...But Being Declared Brain Dead
Doesn't Always Mean the End of One's Life!
The following comes from a Fed.
3, 2003 article, entitled 'Brain dead: Is it the same as 'really dead'?, by Andy
Ho, a senior writer with The Straits Times:
"LUCKILY for Miss Tanya
Liu, she was declared dead in a country with an opt-in organ donation
programme. Otherwise she might be buried by now and her organs working away in
other people's bodies.
"Instead, the Taiwanese newscaster, declared
brain dead by London doctors after she was injured severely in a train crash
in May last year, was moved at the insistence of her family to a hospital in
Beijing.
"There, herbal remedies and electrical
stimulation of her brain saw her regain consciousness three months
later."
"The proposal to make brain death the legal
criterion for harvesting organs here has made some people uneasy, especially
when stories like Miss Liu's suggest that a person is not necessarily dead
when her brain is dead."
"The
definition of death becomes an issue only because of organ transplantation...
If doctors wait until the heart stops beating before they harvest organs,
they must race against the clock to transplant them before they become
unviable."
Researchers at Southampton
University have been giving evidence to a doctors conference from their studies
of patients who had been declared "brain dead".
Sam Parnia, clinical research fellow in pulmonary and
internal medicine has studied 63 patients resuscitated after heart attacks. Some
patients who had been declared "brain dead" recounted conversations
between medical staff during the attempts of resuscitation.
Sam Parnia says, "The findings could have serious
implications for philosophical definitions of life and death and may have an
impact on the criteria used to identify "brain dead" patients suitable
for organ donation.
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