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Body Harvesting - How far is too far to save a life....

I just read an article on wired.com regarding various body harvestings. This struck a cord with me because I am fascinated by the way science can pick up the slack for human flaws. What I learned boiled down to one thing; You can wait on a US donor list, pray pray pray you actually get a donor, and then pay for it for the rest of your life.

OR you can go overseas. Although you are much more likely to receive an affordable organ of your choosing, it is near impossible to learn the history of said organ or even how they retrieved it. In some countries (India and China for example) organs are harvested off of prisoners or robbed from mortuaries...

Are these are only options? Lie dying and praying for an organ that is likely to never come or take the easy route and pretend you're not receiving and organ from somebody that was tortured to get it. There's got to be another way.

This clearly brings up many moral issues. Many find it immoral to desecrate the physical body of the deceased for the purpose of harvesting organs. Others find it immoral to allow someone to die when to the means to save them are available.

Read the article and just throw out there what you think. I'm curious to see what you come up with.

Thanks!

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_redmarkets/all/1

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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Nagao on February 26, 2011 at 7:21pm

Cool article Christie thanks for sharing. I first asked myself this question when I read the book Treason by Orson Scott Card. In it, there is a class of people that are "grown" for spare body parts. This idea resonated with me again when I heard about stem cells and what they are trying to achieve using this new technology. Scientists have successfully grown human parts on mice, and professional athletes now get shots of stem cells to help them recover from surgery more quickly. I'm hoping science will get the opportunity to continue with this research so that this problem will be a thing of the past, with the ability to have perfectly cloned replacement parts grown from stem cells.

But back to the current problem, I think human rights generally need to be regulated by government. I don't think there is anything wrong with people from the United States going to other countries for help, but I think if someone is going to a place in which the government does not regulate donations, they can assume their organs are coming from a shady place. I guess it's up to each individual person to decide if they feel their life is worth more than someone else's at that point.

What do you think should/can be done?