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 5 of 11)

Where does the recovered tissue end up? According to Cindy Speas, WRTC's director of community affairs, the organization is "not involved in any way with anything that is not a not-for-profit." And it's true that the consortium doesn't send tissue directly to corporations. Instead, WRTC provides tissue to LifeNet, another nonprofit, whose mission is to "improve the quality of human life" and "serve the community." LifeNet posted $107 million in revenues in 2004 for "tissue/organ procurement, processing fees, and reimbursements."

 

From LifeNet, the tissue enters the for-profit system. LifeNet has contracted with LifeCell, the company that makes AlloDerm, along with other "alliance partners" such as Osteotech, the firm that makes bone putty. Standard and Poor's lists LifeCell's value at $888 million. From there, tissue can end up as replacement skin for a young burn victim or cosmetic filler for a thin-lipped socialite.

 

LifeNet is not alone in serving as the nonprofit face of a massive for-profit industry. The Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation is the world's largest tissue bank. Osteotech founded the bank to supply it with tissue in 1987. Osteotech and the bank are now separate entities, both pulling in a lot of cash. The Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation reported more than $242 million in revenue in 2004.

 

Six years ago, two journalists at The Orange County Register undertook the most extensive investigation to date of the legal tissue trade. They linked 59 nonprofit tissue procurement agencies with publicly traded, for-profit firms. They also called each agency for comment, and the recorded answers are a jaw-dropping chronicle of deception and arrogance. The director of the nonprofit California Transplant Donor Network, which at the time was selling bone to Osteotech, admonished the Register, "It is not legal to sell organs and tissue." Others explained that families could not comprehend the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit. A spokesperson for the University of Miami Organ Procurement Agency, which sells skin and bone to the biotech company CryoLife, explained, "We can't be educating donors at the bedside."

 

Organizations like WRTC are among the most virulent critics of shady operators like Mastromarino. They want higher barriers to entry for brokers: a stronger Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a more heavily funded Food and Drug Administration with more stringent requirements. Ideally for them, the government would designate one tissue procurement agency per area, as it has done with organs, and leave the big players with monopolies. "The FDA has very stringent requirements for tissue banking," says WRTC's Speas, "but they have not yet gotten the strictest requirements for tissue recovery agencies. Which is why we're seeing these mavericks out there."

 

Above all, such organizations emphasize the fact that they are nonprofit, blazoning their tax status as incontrovertible evidence of ethical purity. Within the tissue business, these distinctions seem to hold little import. One industry expert, who wishes to remain anonymous because he is still heavily involved in tissue procurement, points out that employees of the nonprofit tissue banks generally make more money than those working at for-profit banks. Nonprofits simply turn earnings into salaries. "‘The companies are all run very similarly," Raj Denhoy, a medical device analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co., told the Associated Press in November. "It isn't as if the peo­ple in these companies aren't making a good living."

 

Selling the Gift of Life

Alistair Cooke never agreed to donate his body, but most tissues in the system come from people who wanted their remains to be reused. Hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes have agreements with tissue procurement organizations, inviting them to contact the next of kin as a potential donor nears death.

 

Comments

Xiomara Ortega|3.28.10 @ 11:27PM|#

I will donate my entire body, also the story I saw on TV made me feel very angry about these body snatchers this type of greed is disgusting, these people they don't have mercy, feeling,and most of all compassion for the decease one and the family behind.

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Michael M.|8.9.10 @ 3:04PM|#

I love the article. I understand that this is one case that you hilight but have you ever given thought to newborn body rights and how doctors/nurses, etc., try to get parents to sign away another human being's body parts? Each year over 6 million baby boys are robbed of their foreskins and they weren't even asked! Medical practitioners ask the parents who are not owners of the body. This goes against all medical ethics and the philosophy of "do no harm." Many hospitals do exactly what you've outlined in the above article and sell those foreskins to companies to morph them into anti-aging beauty products. Yes, the same company that sells TNS Recovery Complex is getting ladies all over the world to rub a little foreskin on their faces. The family does not profit from the sale let alone the true owner of that body part: the newborn baby boy. You know what is worse? It is paid for by tax dollars in some states.

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