You're Nobody 'Till Somebody Buys You
Corpses for Capitalism
By Norma Sherry
03/27/06 "ICH" -- -- Grave robbers are back. Unlike the ghouls
of the 1800’s who were caked in mud and slithered about cloaked
in the dark of night today’s ghouls wear Armani and Rolex
watches and prance about in the hollowed halls of modern day
morgues, the finest universities, the best hospitals, and
mortuary offices everywhere. Unlike yesterday’s loathsome
stealers of bodies nowadays they are more likely the
neighborhood mortician or hospital administrator or university
professor.
Money rules. The FDA turns a blind-eye and tweaks its neck in
another direction. Legislators succumb to the power brokers.
Families and the dearly departed believe they are selfless
contributors to the betterment of science and humankind. But,
the truth more often than most of us are willing to acknowledge,
is that they are being duped.
In Annie Cheney’s book, Body Brokers, she delves deeply into
America’s underground trade of brokering bodies and body parts.
A new, fresh body can bring in as much as $200,000 if sold off
in parts. Diener’s are expert at precisely cutting off limbs,
dissecting hearts and brains, even blood vessels and skin. Each
cutting has a price tag. If it’s new meat, and that is how the
industry views the deceased, its worth is considerably more.
An industry that is not bound by laws or legislators is
permitted to run amuck. Individuals who request that their
bodies be given to medical science, or loved ones whose loved
one is taken suddenly and who may offer their remains to
science, are unaware that the university coffers are overflowing
with the bodies of the departed. Unscrupulous professors tempted
by the big bucks are succumbing to the seduction of getting rich
quick.
Worse yet are the body brokers who are willing to sell off parts
and tissue of a diseased deceased caring less of the
consequences and more about lining their own pockets. Stories of
diseased-ridden bones, organs and tissue sometimes make the
news. A human outcry ensues, lawmakers articulate their legal
disgust, the outrage dies down, the story is forgotten, and
everyone settles down and back to business as usual.
It’s become a billon-dollar business. One might rightly state
that “they’re worth more dead than alive”, which brings to mind
a more sinister and complex concern. Mashed up bone meal,
specific bone fragments, and articulated bones are an
orthopedist’s tools of the trade. Doctors, hospitals, surgeons
don’t ask where these parts came from they’re just happy and
relieved they’ve got them at their disposal. Without them bone
replacement surgery would be non-existent. They rely on
companies such as Regeneration Technologies, Inc., and the
plethora of companies with names that give little clue to the
layperson as to their true business: Bio-technology, Bio-medical
Tissue Services, Surgical Body Forms, Science-Care Anatomical,
and National Anatomical Services.
The practice of utilizing tissue, bone, and muscle from the
deceased is not relegated to the Orthopod. The plastic surgeon
may use cadaver skin to puff up a thin lip or fill in a jaw
line; a dentist uses ground up bone to fill in teeth. An
ophthalmologist may use a cadaver Cornea to repair vision. All
good uses one would argue, and agreeably that’s true. The
problem lies in the lie. Many, too many of the bodies used were
never intended for such use, nor were they tested to be disease
free.
Crematoriums have grown as an industry offering a less expensive
internment for the deceased than burials and coffins and such,
but as such, they’ve also become an excellent resource for the
nefarious body broker. In some cases the limbs have been sliced
off and sold off. After all, would a family know if they were
missing a few ashes? In worse cases, families received
commingled ashes of an assortment of body parts because their
loved ones never saw the crematorium at all. Rather, their lot
in eternity was to be sold piecemeal: one piece at a time.
Today’s bodies originally donated, unbeknownst to the families,
routinely show up in fancy hotels like Trump International in
Miami. Steel gurney’s line up in a row with cadavers in altered
stages of decomposition and are displayed under surgical lights
readied for the surgeon’s new lessons. Modern day companies of
surgical equipment instruct physicians and surgeons on their
latest techniques on cadavers in fancy hotels. Although spray
bottles of disinfectant and room deodorizers are used, there is
no denying the stench of rotting flesh. An unusual occurrence,
one would think in the elegant ballroom of many noteworthy
hotels. Surprisingly, it is the same ballroom, which one might
visit for dinner or a wedding celebration the day after a
cadaver class. The bodies are always supplied by the infamous,
unregulated Body Broker.
With no end in sight for the need of fresh bodies it would seem
that body brokering is a business growing steadily every day.
One such corporation, RTI, or Regeneration Technologies, Inc.,
based in Florida is already a multi-billion dollar company who
is spreading its wealth by buying up smaller companies and going
international.
Willed body programs of many universities are well-intentioned,
but not so true are the dieners’ whose job it is to dissect and
dismember or the ill-paid professor struggling to make ends
meet. Without legislation and laws protecting our dearly
departed, it appears that one is worth more dead then alive.
Yes, indeed the grave robber is back. He’s still a ghoul; he’s
just better dressed.
Norma Sherry is an award-winning writer, co-founder of
Together Forever Changing, an organization designed to enlighten
and encourage citizens to fight for our liberties. She is also
the producer and host of the weekly Norma Sherry Show on WQXT-TV.
Norma welcomes your emails:
norma@togetherforeverchanging.org
© Norma Sherry 2006
