Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A LESSON IN SUPPLY AND DEMAND

The Washington Post carries this from AP:

“7 Plead Guilty in Stolen Body Parts Case”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/18/AR2006101800624.html

From the article:

“Seven funeral home directors linked to a scheme to plunder corpses and sell the body parts for transplants have secretly pleaded guilty to undisclosed charges, prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes also announced that a grand jury had voted to bring a new indictment in the case that adds allegations involving funeral homes in New York City and Rochester.

"It is clear that many more funeral home directors were involved in this enterprise," Hynes said.

The seven unidentified directors all agreed to cooperate in an ongoing investigation into what investigators describe as an enterprise to steal bone and tissue from cadavers and sell the material to biomedical supply companies for profit, Hynes said.”

Well, the dead hand of Adam Smith works on other dead body parts… We shouldn’t be surprised. You have a huge demand and a potentially huge supply being held apart by an artificial barrier, which, needless to say, makes the commodity very profitable…

I’m surprised it took this long for the death industry to grow an offshoot…

And one final observation: Stem cell technologies will probably make this kind of “harvesting” obsolete… So the sooner the wackjobs in the religious right abandon their silly prejudice against stem cell research, the sooner the dead will be safe…

Comments: Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?