From Growing A Bladder, To Stealing A Kidney

Yesterday I posted about advances in engineering human organs. Today, I read a much more disturbing story from The Weekly Standard, not about growing organs, but about stealing them. There is a religious movement, originating in China, called Falun Gong, which was outlawed by the Chinese government in 1999. According to Ethan Gutmann, who wrote the piece for The Weekly Standard, many of its followers have been imprisoned. "The number of Falun Gong practitioners in custody is disputed; estimates by the Chinese dissident community range from 235,000 to one million or more." There are accusations from practitioners of Falun Gong, and workers in the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, that imprisoned members of this group have had their organs harvested, while still living, and their bodies incinerated once divested of anything of value.

The article makes it clear that these are unconfirmed allegations to date, and have in fact been dismissed by the U.S. State Department, but Gutmann runs through a sizable list of reasons that the charges should not be dismissed out of hand. He suspects the worst, believes profit to be the prime motivation, and Falun Gong practitioners an easy target.

One reason is that the Chinese authorities have always handled Falun Gong with a peculiar vehemence, even in comparison with other enemies of the CCP. When Falun Gong was declared illegal on July 21, 1999, ancient sound trucks drove around Beijing to make sure that no one missed the point. That's unusual. At the time, I was working in Chinese television, and I remember the day well. Several of my Chinese colleagues began laughing nervously and buried their faces in their hands, muttering that they had not seen such a thing since the Cultural Revolution. Since then, Falun Gong participants have regularly disappeared, with no arrest record, nothing but an assigned number, leaving them particularly vulnerable.

He goes on to say:

But the main reason I'm pessimistic is the money. Organ transplants are a profitable business. Until recently, a website out of Shenyang carried a price list for organ transplant operations in English to attract foreign customers, with a kidney transplant going for $62,000. And there is precedent; it is indisputable that the Chinese Communist party has sanctioned the sale of body parts from executed prisoners. As a former Beijing business consultant, I am familiar with the peculiar combination of state directive and entrepreneurial acumen pervasive in the New China. A directive comes from on high. The money is made down below.

Read the whole thing. It's not conclusive, but certainly has enough substance to warrant the world's attention.