Cadaver tissue industry becomes big business

NEW YORK — Like a gallon of gasoline, the price of a human leg is all about supply and demand.

And it's a seller's market.

"There's a lot of money to be made on corpses," said Joshua Slocum, executive director of the nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance.

Over the past two decades, the tissue industry has exploded into a billion-dollar business, creating a huge demand for ligaments, tendons, bones and other valuable body parts.

But there are simply not enough bodies as companies try to keep pace with an increasing number of procedures that use allografts, or cadaver tissue.

"We are growing quite fast," said James Forsell, president of the American Association of Tissue Banks and vice president of Tissue Banks International Inc. "We're growing because of the need."

The tissue trade is complicated by a long-standing law that forbids the buying and selling of body parts. The law, however, hasn't stopped people from doing just that every day.

Here's how it works. Companies charge fees or "reasonable payments associated with the removal, transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control and storage of a human organ," according to the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984.

But these fees are illusory, argues Michele Goodwin, author of "Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts."

"There's such a markup that they're really much more like a payment, not a nominal fee," she said. "We are talking about business operations that have strict pecuniary interests."

Money is being made hand (which goes for $350 to $850) over foot ($200 to $400 each), according to the new book "Body Brokers" by Annie Cheney.

Executives are earning generous salaries, and the companies for which they work are generating huge revenues thanks to advances in modern medicine that can transform tissue into a variety of implants such as a skin graft or bone chip.

But this is an industry unlike others, comprising a hodgepodge of players, all of them angling to get tissue from the 20,000 people who donate their bodies a year.

On one side of the industry sits for-profit companies that process the tissue. On the other, competing nonprofits such as tissue banks that make up the backbone of the industry.