Who Owns Your Body Parts?

Everyone's making money in the market for body tissue -- except the donors.

Kerry Howley from the March 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 11)

 

In February 2005, Mastromarino and three others were indicted on 122 charges, including body stealing and opening graves. The grisly story received perhaps more media attention than any such scandal since a wave of body snatching in the 18th century. A February 2006 Paula Zahn Now segment spun the story into the perfect media narrative, complete with a villain, a celebrity, and a whistleblower. But that telling, and many others, failed to point out that much of Mastromarino's basic business model was perfectly legal, common, and necessary to the biotech industry. If Mastromarino had been smarter, he could have made a fortune off body parts while staying well within the limits of the law.

 

Consider the massive market in which Mastromarino played but a tiny role. Demand for human tissue has never been higher, and human remains have never been more valuable. According to the American Association of Tissue Banks, doctors perform more than 1 million tissue transplants each year, using everything from secondhand ligaments to hand-me-down heart valves. That fuels a thriving industry composed of tissue banks, biotech firms, and middlemen. Each year the industry takes in an estimated $1 billion in revenue, not a cent of which will go to the families or heirs of the donors who provide the raw material.

 

As the Cooke scandal deepened in early 2006, the Association of American Tissue Banks sent its members a set of talking points, almost all of which emphasized the outlier status of Mastromarino's operation. There are important differences between BTS and legal banks, the association emphasized. Most crucially, Mastromarino never sought the consent of donor families before harvesting the tissue of their relatives. He conspired with funeral directors, lied about the quality of the tissue, and put transplant recipients in danger. "What these folks are alleged to have done violates everything we stand for and everything we are trying to do," says Robert Rigney, CEO of the association.

 

Yet a small but growing number of academics, doctors, and legislators believe the Cooke scandal wasn't an aberration but an inevitability. They believe the tissue industry as a whole, even as it strives to distance itself from Mastromarino, is abusing families on a scale well beyond the reach of any one body broker. "The industry will argue that these are aberrant, isolated events that are irrelevant," says Todd Olson, a professor of anatomy and structural biology at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. "My view is it's exactly the opposite. What we're really dealing with here is the tip of the iceberg."

 

Olson believes that the generosity of donors is being abused on an "epic scale" by tissue procurement organizations, middlemen, and biotech companies that depend on tissue for their survival. With scientific advances there has emerged an enormously beneficial market in remains. But the players most fundamental to that market, donors, are locked out, prohibited by law from sharing in the benefits that others derive from their bodies. At the heart of this inequity is a confusion over to what extent we control our own persons-over whether we own our increasingly valuable component parts.

 

Resting in Pieces

Mastromarino found several buyers for his cadaveric contraband, among them a highly profitable biotech firm known as LifeCell. The New Jersey-based corporation ranked 16 on Fortune's list of fastest growing businesses in 2006, and with good reason: Its stock shot up 28 percent that year. The company owes much of the success to its flagship skin graft, AlloDerm.

 

"AlloDerm is a miraculous substance," says Maryland plastic surgeon Mark Richards, "given its universal acceptance into the human body." Doctors have found that human bodies are far less likely to reject AlloDerm than previous skin substitutes. The graft melts into human flesh because it is derived from human flesh, the stripped-down product of bodies pulled apart after death.