|
Article Excerpt
On February 23, 2006, four men were arraigned before Brooklyn State Supreme Court Judge John Walsh on a startling series of charges: Prosecutors claimed that the men, who worked for a company called Biomedical Tissue Services, had engaged in a modern form of body-snatching.
According to the indictment, they had paid $1,000 per body to 30 or 40 funeral homes in the New York and Philadelphia areas. Then--without consent of the families of the deceased--they used scalpels, mallets, scissors, and saws to remove the organs, tissue, and bones, which they sold for transplant, research, and medical education.
The indictment also alleges that the men misrepresented the age, cause of death, and health status of the corpses. After mining the bodies for valuable parts, they sent them off for cremation. If a funeral was intended, they inserted PVC plumbing pipe in place of the bones and sewed the body back up.
The state charged the four men with crimes that included enterprise corruption, body-stealing, opening graves, unlawful dissection, and forgery. (1) They were also hit with lawsuits: Their actions created potential risks for tissue and organ recipients and resulted in 11 class actions on behalf of thousands of patients who received skin and bone grafts from Biomedical Tissue Services?
An exceptionally ghoulish example of unscrupulous business practices, the Biomedical Tissue Services scandal is also just one instance of legal problems related to the collection and distribution of human tissue. Every day, abuses of rights occur in the tissue industry-some at elite universities or prominent pharmaceutical companies. Often the blood, organs, and other tissues come from living people who desperately need legal representation.
Few lawyers are prepared to handle cases that might cross so many areas of law: tort, property, gift, bailment, constitutional rights, and federal regulation. And some judges--blinded by defendants' claims that they were acting to further medical progress--refuse to protect the people whose tissue is used, even when the law is clearly on the victims' side. (3)
Unethical practices in the tissue industry have grown, just as the value of human tissue, from both living and dead donors, has increased dramatically in the biotech era. A human egg can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. A single cadaver can be mined for medical and research uses--its skin is worth $36,522, its bones $80,000, its tendons $21,400, and so forth. The value of a particularly interesting human gene can be billions of dollars. Is it any wonder that courts are now faced with cases that involve biotheft?
The legal system is beginning to address how human tissue is acquired, what it is used for, and how to protect people who receive it--whether as a transplant, a transfusion, a bone graft, an embryonic stem cell line, a gene therapy, or even a biotech pharmaceutical product.
Some doctors view their patients as treasure troves, taking tissue from them without their consent. When physicians who were also researchers were developing contraceptives from fertilized eggs, their employees would encourage women to have unprotected sex in their fertile periods before getting pelvic surgery. In one study, these doctors recovered 34 fertilized eggs from women undergoing hysterectomies, tubal ligations, and other pelvic surgeries who apparently did not realize they were pregnant. One of the doctors joked about how he "poached" eggs--piercing patients' ovaries and aspirating their eggs while they were having pelvic surgery for other reasons. (4)
Whose tissue is it, anyway?
In another case--familiar to everyone who has graduated from law...
|
