Levin Izhak Rosenbaum (Kevin Hagen/New York Daily News)

One of the more intriguing aspects of Thursday’s massive corruption arrest in New Jersey was the case of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, accused of brokering illegal deals to buy kidneys from living donors. His story got us wondering: how much can you harvest from your own body?  NEWSWEEK's Jeneen Interlandi lists some of the organs one can donate while still alive (and, when the data were available, how much they go for):

Kidneys: You have two. You can live with one. As the most in-demand organ, kidneys fetch a high price: $30,000 in the U.S. (in which case the alleged customers of Rosenbaum were getting totally ripped off┴he’s accused of selling kidneys for $160,000 each).*

Liver: You have only one, but if you slice some off, it will grow back. Livers are the second most in-demand organ, bringing about $10,000 in the U.S.

Lung: Each lung has five lobes. You can safely part with one lobe, but any recipient would need a second lobe (from a second donor) to benefit from your gift.

Eyes: Whole eyes cannot be transplanted. But individual components of the eye┴namely the lens and the cornea┴can. Some anthropologists and human-rights workers have reported the sale of lenses and corneas from living donors.

Intestine: It’s possible, but the risks are so great and the need so rare that intestine donations almost always come from deceased donors. The vast majority of intestine recipients are young children with rare disorders.

Pancreas: Another organ of which you can donate a segment. Pancreas transplants are often done to improve quality of life (by reducing or eliminating the need for constant insulin injections in diabetics, for example). They still come mostly from deceased donors, but the number of living donors is growing as the transplant technology improves.

Skin: For a long time, the feeling was that taking skin from living donors was impractical. Nowadays, people who have excess skin after significant weight loss can donate that skin, usually to burn victims for skin-graft surgery. As with eye trafficking, rumors have long circulated about a black-market trade in human skin.

Bone marrow: Harvested inside the bone, this tissue regrows in healthy donors but is killed off by chemotherapy in patients with certain types of cancer. Donated marrow allows doctors to pursue more aggressive treatments.

Blood: Another non-organ, but blood is probably the easiest, safest, and most common type of donation.


* The price for healthy kidneys on the black market varies depending on the region. In 2005, the watchdog group Organs Watch report listed the following black-market rates for healthy kidneys:
U.S.: $30,000
Israel: $10,000-$20,000
Peru: $10,000
Turkey: $7,500
Brazil: $6,000
Moldova and Romania: $2,700
India: $1,500
Philippines: $1,500
Prewar Iraq $750-$10,000

Guess who was thinking of running a Q&A on organ sales Wednesday, only to decide that it wasn't newsy enough?  I'll give you a hint: her giant head is smirking at you in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen right now. Still, any coverage we might have surreptitiously planned would likely pale in comparison with the fantastic story Jeneen Interlandi wrote in January of this year. Called "Not Just Urban Legend," it looked at the very real practice of organ trafficking in America, and mixed sobering stats with crazy true-crime detail. To wit:

... a Brooklyn dialysis patient purchased his kidney from Nick Rosen, an Israeli man who wanted to visit America. Unlike some organ sellers, who told of dingy basement hospitals with less equipment than a spartan kitchen, Rosen found an organ broker through a local paper in Tel Aviv who arranged to have the transplant done at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. An amateur filmmaker, Rosen documented a portion of his odyssey on camera and sent the film to [anthropologist Nancy] Scheper-Hughes, whose research he had read about online. The video excerpt that NEWSWEEK viewed shows Rosen meeting his broker and buyer in a New York coffee shop where they haggle over price, then entering Mount Sinai and talking with surgeons—one of whom asks him to put the camera away. Finally, after displaying his post-surgery scars for the camera, Rosen is seen rolling across a hotel bed covered in $20 bills; he says he was paid $15,000.

As for the ethical objection that poor people shouldn't be tempted into selling spare body parts for cash, running a small but measurable risk to their health, [law professor and organ-sales advocate Lloyd Cohen] suggests a comparison with other valued commodities that are dangerous to obtain, like tuna fish. People risk their lives on fishing boats because they're paid for it. By the same token, says Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who debated on Cohen's team at the IQ2 U.S. event, "we don't think firemen are any less heroic because they are paid to save us." 

by Jeneen Interlandi

About the arrest of a handful of rabbis from New York and New Jersey on charges of organ trafficking, I have two things to say: One, I knew it! And two, nobody cares.

When we reported on organ trafficking late last year, my main source for the story, a medical anthropologist by the name of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, told me that a couple of rabbis and synagogues in Brooklyn, N.Y., had been repeatedly been cited by her informants as well-known organ brokers. Nancy has done an extraordinary amount of detective work in the past two decades mapping the organs trade across the globe. She's gone undercover in Turkish slums, tracked down leads in Argentinian mental hospitals, and interviewed potential sources in Israeli prisons. She has also routinely reached out to the FBI and analogous law-enforcement bodies in other countries─usually to no avail. Maybe because she is a mere medical anthropologist, maybe because she had nothing more than word-of-mouth reports (albeit hundreds of pages of them, often from admitted criminals), the FBI did not seem to take her calls seriously (organ-trafficking allegations in yesterday's bust were the byproduct of a larger investigation on money laundering).

And without real prodding from a greater authority than this Berkeley professor, transplant surgeons caught in Nancy's cross hairs have been equally happy to discount her claims. As we wrote back in January, Scheper-Hughes has confronted at least three U.S. hospitals with evidence that their surgeons have been transplanting illegally brokered kidneys. Her field notes include the names of several people picked up in yesterday's raid─people whose charity organizations purported to pair altruistic donors with dialysis patients in need, and who had close working relationships with some very good U.S. hospitals. In response to her charges, and in response to inquiries from NEWSWEEK, officials from those hospitals have insisted that their transplant programs take every precaution against organ trafficking, and that intentional deceit is almost impossible to uncover. The wiretap evidence released yesterday will be less easily dismissed. It will be interesting to see if the FBI or anyone else follows the organ-trafficking trail to these hospitals, or to any number of Web sites that make similar claims of altruism and charity, but have been implicated in the work of Nancy and others.

For obvious reasons, our story names only the hospital where we could substantiate Nancy's claims─with a video, of all things, sent to us by a man who proudly sold his own kidney through an illegal broker.

Which gets me to my second point. The vast majority of readers who responded to our story saw nothing wrong with the idea of organ selling. I received dozens of e-mails (and some calls) from people wanting to know what the big deal was. Several even asked where they could sell their own "extra kidney." (FYI: Just because you can survive without it, doesn't mean it's "extra." Most doctors will tell you that you really ought to keep both, if you can.) Sorry, but this mentality only works if you happen to live in a First World country with a comparatively decent health-care system. Most of the people who sell their organs, through rabbis or gangsters or whoever, don't live in developed countries. And most of them aren't selling their kidneys to get out of credit-card debt or to buy a bigger car. When organ brokers come to their neighborhoods, offering cash for their kidneys or for slices of their liver (or, according to some rumors, for one of their eyes), most of those who sell are doing it so they can buy food, or medicine, or a place to live. You might disagree, but I can't help thinking that a system which forces one to chose between two kidneys and food for their family is an inherently flawed one. And that's not even accounting for the fact that some thug from Jersey posing as a clergy member gets most of the money.