Colby College, Maine : 7-8 PM Monday Event info here

March 7th,Wed

Brandeis University: Goldfarb Library  5:30 PM

March 8th, Thurs

Nichols College: Davis 205/207,7:00 p.m.  Books will be available for sale and signing by author

March 9, Fri

Berkshire Health Systems: Grand Rounds

The Red Market by Scott Carney

by Daniel Grushkin

Bloomberg-Businessweek, August 4 2011

In 2008 police officers smashed open the doors of a dairy farm in northern India and found 17 people hooked to IV tubes, being drained of blood, too weak to run away. The farmer and his staff had kept them alive simply to milk their veins and sell off the contents to local blood banks. This is just one of the horrifying everyday tales of the body trade documented in Scott Carney’s The Red Market—his coinage for the mostly legal and sometimes creepy multibillion-dollar business of buying and selling the stuff of human life, including organs, bones, embryos, and blood.

As Carney explains, the body industry adheres to the same basic trade rules as “shoes and electronics.” New types of transplant surgeries, coupled with globalization, however, have conspired to create a loosely regulated, seedy enterprise that ruins lives even as it saves them. While patients wait on interminable donor lists in some countries, medical tourists are traveling to developing regions to take advantage of a nearly endless supply of “donors.” According to a McKinsey study, up to 85,000 U.S. patients dabbled in the red market in 2008.

It isn’t always pretty. When the Indian government moved victims of the 2004 tsunami into the Tsunami Nagar tent camp in Chennai, illegal organ brokers descended en masse. Carney reports that women at the camp, eventually known as Kidneyville, were offered up to $3,000 for their organs, though they often got far less. “Almost every woman in Tsunami Nagar has a story about how organ brokers took advantage of her during her most desperate hour,” he writes. Within a year, Carney notes, doctors from 52 Indian hospitals performed 2,000 illegal kidney operations—with recipients paying up to $14,000 per surgery. “Inevitably, red markets have the nasty social side effect of moving flesh upward—never downward—through social classes,” Carney writes. “Even without a criminal element, unrestricted free markets act like vampires, sapping the health and strength from ghettos of poor donors and funneling their parts to the wealthy.”

Yet the red market isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Kidney transplants extend lives. Surrogates who carry an embryo to term give couples who can’t conceive the opportunity to have children. Yet the real question has become how to regulate the market. Theories fall into two extremes. Some countries, such as Iran and the Philippines, recognize the trade with the belief that clear laws bring an already thriving business out of the shadows. Still, a regulated body market doesn’t necessarily lead to a successful business. When selling blood was legal in the U.S., from the 1940s through the 1960s, for-profit blood banks consistently failed both donors and recipients. Brokers turned up in slums to tap the poorest of the population for the lowest prices. As a result, the quality of blood stores suffered, donors and blood banks disregarded basic cleanliness, and disease spread into the supply. Eventually, hospital administrators and doctors became frustrated and turned to volunteers.

For many Western countries, a ban on the sale of body parts isn’t ideal, either. In the U.S., the exorbitant cost to transplant a liver ($523,000) or intestines ($1.2 million) often drives patients to countries with murkier regulations. Carney estimates that about 10 percent of the red market operates illegally. And the widespread exploitation—ranging from the rental of Indian wombs to the adoption of slum babies—hinges on the industry’s insistence of anonymity: The medical system seals the identities of donors and recipients, to protect both parties. Yet anonymity gives rise to a chain of middlemen who work unseen and get away with cheating, or worse. Carney argues for exposing the whole system by simply creating openly accessible pedigrees. Imagine IV bags with blood donors’ names on them, he argues, or adoption centers that list the birth parents. Parts of the red market might not survive, he suggests. Though it also might just shift to countries where the supply chain is even less regulated.

Growing industries rarely reform themselves when they’re making a fortune, and the red market is unlikely to be any different. “Who we are as a society depends on how we address the remaining 10 percent,” Carney writes. “Do we let blood brokers and child kidnappers ply their trade and write off the human fallout as just another cost of doing business?” The rhetorical answer is no, of course, but the realistic answer is that the supply side will vanish only when demand does. It’s up to potential customers—perhaps as much as law enforcement—to halt the growth of the red market’s illicit side. Promising advances in cell science might soon make organ transplants obsolete, but until a breakthrough comes—and is cost-competitive—the red market will continue to thrive. That’s just plain economics.

See the article on Businessweek.com

Need a Kidney? A Skull? Just Bring Cash

Whereas black markets trade in illegal goods like guns and drugs, the “red market,” the journalist Scott Carney says in his revealing if somewhat scattershot new book, trades in human flesh — in kidneys and other organs, in human corneas, blood, bones and eggs. Many of the real-life examples he cites in this chilling volume cannot help but remind the reader of a horror movie, or of Kazuo Ishiguro’s devastating dystopian novel “Never Let Me Go” (2005), in which we learn that a group of children are clones who have been raised to “donate” replacement body parts.

In “The Red Market” Mr. Carney recounts the story of a police raid on a dairy farmer’s land in a small Indian border town that freed 17 people who had been confined in shacks and who said they’d been bled at least two times per week. “The Blood Factory,” as it was called in the local press, he writes, “was supplying a sizable percentage” of the city hospitals’ blood supply.

Mr. Carney also investigates the bone trade in India — for almost 200 years, “the world’s primary source of bones used in medical study” — and tries to track down the head of a grave robbing ring in West Bengal, who, according to police, was pilfering corpses from cemeteries, morgues, and funeral pyres and employed “almost a dozen people to shepherd the bones through the various stages of defleshing and curing.”

A contributing editor at Wired magazine, Mr. Carney writes with considerable narrative verve, slamming home the misery of what he has witnessed with passion and visceral detail. His book does not attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of red markets in the world today. Much of Mr. Carney’s reporting focuses on India (where he lived and worked for a decade), while dealing only cursorily with human organ trafficking in other hot spots like the Philippines and Brazil.

In one chapter Mr. Carney describes an impoverished Indian refugee camp for survivors of the 2004 tsunami that was known as Kidneyvakkam, or Kidneyville, because so many people there had sold their kidneys to organ brokers in efforts to raise desperately needed funds. “Brokers,” he writes, “routinely quote a high payout — as much as $3,000 for the operation — but usually only dole out a fraction of the offered price once the person has gone through it. Everyone here knows that it is a scam. Still the women reason that a rip-off is better than nothing at all.” For these people, he adds, selling organs “sometimes feels like their only option in hard times”; poor people around the world, in his words, “often view their organs as a critical social safety net.”

Toward the end of the book Mr. Carney notes that “criminal and unethical red markets are far smaller than their legitimate counterparts.” According to the World Health Organization, he writes, “about 10 percent of world organ transplants are obtained on the black market.” But he emphasizes that “red markets are now larger, more pervasive, and more profitable than at any other time in history,” and that “globalization has made the speed and complexity of these markets bewildering.”

The most alarming allegations cited in this book come from a 2006 report released by David Kilgour, a former member of the Canadian Parliament, and the human rights lawyer David Matas, which suggested that vital organs (including kidneys, corneas and livers) had been harvested on a large scale from executed members of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual group in China. The Chinese government denied the allegations.

“No one is saying the Chinese government went after the Falun Gong specifically for their organs,” Mr. Carney writes, “but it seems to have been a remarkably convenient and profitable way to dispose of them. Dangerous political dissidents were executed while their organs created a comfortable revenue stream for hospitals and surgeons, and presumably many important Chinese officials received organs.”

Mr. Carney is not able to verify the Kilgour-Matas report independently. For that matter, his overall approach here tends to be heavily anecdotal and selective, focusing on horror stories like the kidnapping of a young Indian boy, who, the police said, was brought to an orphanage “that paid cash for healthy children” and then “exported the children to unknowing families abroad.” .

As Mr. Carney sees it: “Eventually, red markets have the nasty social side effect of moving flesh upward — never downward — through social classes. Even without a criminal element, unrestricted free markets act like vampires, sapping the health and strength from ghettos of poor donors and funneling their parts to the wealthy.”

His book is filled with harrowing stories in which the destitute and desperate end up sacrificing their bodies for the sake of a few dollars that fail to change their lives.

In one chapter Mr. Carney writes that most egg donors in Cyprus — which “had more fertility clinics per capita than any other country” — come from the relatively small population of poor Eastern European immigrants who are “eager to sell their eggs at any price.” A donor in Cyprus will probably get paid a few hundred dollars for her eggs, Mr. Carney estimates, while customers — often from Western Europe — will pay $8,000 to $14,000 for full-service egg implantation with in vitro fertilization in Cyprus, “about 30 percent less than the next cheapest spot in the Western world.”

Globalization has also brought what Mr. Carney calls the “fertility tourism industry” to India, which, he says, “legalized surrogacy in 2002 as part of a larger effort to promote medical tourism.” At the Akanksha Infertility Clinic (which was featured in an “Oprah” segment), he says, surrogates, who make between $5,000 and $6,000, live in residential units, where “they will spend their entire pregnancies under lock and key.” The clinic charges between $15,000 and $20,000 for the entire process, he reports, “whereas in the handful of American states that allow paid surrogacy, bringing a child to term can cost between $50,000 and $100,000.”

“Before India, only the American upper classes could afford a surrogate,” Mr. Carney writes. “Now it’s almost within reach of the middle class. While surrogacy has always raised ethical questions, the increasing scale of the industry makes the issue far more urgent. With hundreds of new clinics poised to open, the economics of surrogate pregnancies are moving faster than our understanding of its implications.”

In addressing such ethical questions throughout this grisly but fascinating volume, Mr. Carney forces the reader to think about the moral issues raised by advances in medicine. His book also asks us to re-evaluate the roles that privacy, anonymity and altruism play in the current “system of flesh exchange” — which, as disturbing as it is to contemplate, is subject, like those for other commodities, to the brutal marketplace equations of supply and demand.

See full review on the New York Times

On the night of Jan. 21, Turkish police officers burst into a villa in Istanbul’s Asian quarter and arrested a 53-year-old transplant surgeon named Yusuf Sonmez. Interpol had been looking for Sonmez since 2008, when a Turkish man collapsed in the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, and reported that his kidney had been stolen. The incident led to an investigation by European Union prosecutors, who uncovered an international organ-stealing and smuggling ring of alarming scope. Sonmez and eight co-conspirators, prosecutors alleged in December, had lured poor people from Central Asia and Europe to Pristina, harvested their organs, and sold them at up to $100,000 a pop to medical tourists from Canada, Germany, Israel, and Poland. The clinic where Sonmez did his work, a separate report by the Council of Europe alleged, was part of an even vaster organ-smuggling network — one which, incredibly, even involved Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci.

The trafficking operation was gristly, but hardly unusual. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 10 percent of the world’s organ transplants originate on the black market; as a rule of thumb, that figure seems to hold true across the trade in human body parts. And while occasional law enforcement successes like Sonmez’s arrest do happen, for the most part no one is really seriously attempting to shut down a market that is not just lucrative, but, many would argue, inevitable.

It would be an understatement to say that the last century has been a golden age for medical science. The average human lifespan today is almost a 30 years longer than it was in 1900. We’ve seen the advent of once-unthinkable innovations such as antibiotics, blood transfusions, and the surgical wizardry of organ transplants. These once-miraculous feats depend on a supply infrastructure that those of us outside of the medical profession rarely think about. We take it for granted that if we get into a car accident that the local hospital will have blood on hand for a life-saving transfusion. If our kidneys fail, we expect a spot on the transplant list. If we are infertile, we expect to have access to someone else’s sperm or eggs, or — if we can afford it — the services of a surrogate mother to bring a child to term. . . .

Click to read the rest on Foreign Policy.com

For six years I didn’t only collect stories from people who supplied their flesh on the red market. I also took pictures. Here is a small set of photos that appeared in the book. Above is Fatima whose daughter Zabeen was kidnapped from a slum in Chennai and sold to an Australian family through a network of unwitting adoption agencies. Please don’t reproduce these without my permission.   Click here to see the gallery.

During the mid-2000s, Scott Carney was living in southern India and teaching American anthropology students on their semester abroad when one of his charges died, apparently a suicide. For two days, he watched over her body while the provincial police investigated her death, reporters bribed their way into the morgue to photograph the newsworthy corpse, local doctors performed an autopsy, and ice had to be rounded up to retard decomposition. Finally, his boss asked Carney to take pictures of the girl’s mangled remains for analysis by forensic experts back in the States. (review by Laura Miller)

Read the rest of the review on Salon

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 parlor customer looking for the perfect ‘do, there’s no substitute for a piece of someone else.

The problem is, demand for replacement flesh grossly outstrips supply. In the US and like-minded countries, it’s illegal to sell body parts—they can be taken only from those who filled out a donor card before they died or who 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 exploitive: 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.

An in-depth report that takes readers on a shocking tour through a macabre global underworld where organs, bones, and live people are bought and sold on the red market

Investigative journalist Scott Carney has spent five years on the ground tracing the lucrative and deeply secretive trade in human bodies and body parts—a vast hidden economy known as the “red market.” From the horrifying to the ridiculous, he discovers its varied forms: an Indian village nicknamed “Kidneyvakkam” because most of its residents have sold their kidneys for cash; unscrupulous grave robbers who steal human bones from cemeteries, morgues, and funeral pyres for anatomical skeletons used in Western medical schools and labs; an ancient temple that makes money selling the hair of its devotees to wig makers in America—to the tune of $6 million annually.

The Red Market reveals the rise, fall, and resurgence of this multibillion-dollar under­ground trade through history, from early medical study and modern universities to poverty-ravaged Eurasian villages and high-tech Western labs; from body snatchers and surrogate mothers to skeleton dealers and the poor who sell body parts to survive. While local and international law enforcement have cracked down on the market, advances in science have increased the demand for human tissue—ligaments, kidneys, even rented space in women’s wombs—leaving little room to consider the ethical dilemmas inherent in the flesh-and-blood trade. At turns tragic, voyeuristic, and thought-provoking, The Red Marketis an eye-opening, surreal look at a little-known global industry and its

Critical Praise:

“The Red Market is a thrilling adventure into the global body business, with keen insight into the economics that drive it. Scott Carney investigates both our insatiable need for replacement human parts and the uncanny and often disturbing ways we go about getting them.”

“The Red Market is an unforgettable nonfiction thriller, expertly reported. Scott Carney takes us on a tremendously revealing and twisted ride, where life and death are now mere cold cash commodities.”

Tuesday May 31:

12:30 PM EST –  New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR)  ”Word of Mouth”

10:30 AM PST – KPCC  ”Air Talk with Larry Mantle”

12:00 AM PST – KPFA “Against the Grain”

Wednesday June 1:

WAMC (New York) “Round Table”

WVUM (Florida) “News”

Thursday June 10:

NPR : “All Things Considered”