Authors: Rex Burns
Public relations, however, is public relations; the hospital spokeswoman, apologizing for the doctor’s abruptness—“They’re under tremendous pressure, you understand”—gave me a list of stations that I could visit: The patient preparation area, where the recipient, called from home as soon as word on a donor arrived, would come in breathless and more than a little frightened, yet hopeful and excited nonetheless. The operating room itself, not nearly so filled with space-age technology as the television shows reported. In fact, compared to the hospital’s bare, starkly lit room, where everything was on wheels, the surgery in Matheney’s suite of offices a block or so away seemed cheerfully luxurious. Finally, the computer with its twenty-four-hour monitor and a backup sheet prominently posted that listed the types of recipients waiting.
“We have a program that automatically places calls to the transplant team when a suitable donor comes on the screen.” The nurse’s aide pointed to the bank of machines that filled one wall of a cramped and windowless room. “But just in case, the backup list is on the wall and I’m supposed to answer when the alert beep calls our control number.”
“So all the doctors are rousted when a donor shows up?”
“No, only our specialty team and its surgeon. We don’t do hearts, for example, so our beepers don’t sound for those donors. St. Luke’s gets them.”
“What specialty does Warner have?”
“Kidney. We currently have two kidney surgeons, and we’re negotiating with a surgeon in Baltimore to come and open a liver transplant center. The kidney transplant’s really more difficult than a heart transplant,” she sniffed. “But of course, hearts get all the attention.”
“Why is it more difficult?”
“The organ. A kidney’s just a mass of blood vessels that are extremely difficult to work with.”
“Dr. Matheney’s one of your surgeons?”
“Yes. And Dr. Gold is the other. Both are very good.”
“Does Dr. Matheney ever do transplants in his own clinic?”
“Oh, no! Those facilities wouldn’t do. Our operating rooms are especially placed in the hospital not only for access to patient care but also to decrease vibrations. I can’t imagine doing that type of delicate transplant surgery in a clinic’s operating room.”
“But other kinds of transplants?”
“Perhaps in an extreme emergency. But I really can’t imagine it.”
I asked a few more questions, but the main thing I discovered was Matheney’s access to the computer. He would know when a donor somewhere in the country was suitable for one of the hospital’s waiting patients. And he would know what the hospitals were waiting for, even if it had nothing to do with kidneys.
“Dr. Matheney drops in quite often to look over the printouts of requests. He’s really dedicated.” She showed me the sheets, with their lines of abbreviations and numbers that outlined pertinent histological information and the assigned number of the requesting center. “A lot of this is superfluous—any donor’s going to find someone somewhere with a need. But the urgent ones come on line; it’s sort of a final hope.” She amplified: “If we have a donor, for instance, we input the blood and tissue types into the computer, and the program searches for a matching request. It’s all done at a computer bank in Philadelphia, and in a couple minutes, back comes an answer. A hospital in Florida or California might be looking for an organ with just those specifications. I’m sorry we don’t have a donor now in the hospital so you could see how it works.”
I told her I was, too, and thanked her for all the information.
Ace Roofing’s familiar truck and tar trailer sat in the parking lot surrounding a long apartment building. Its roof was a shingled mansard topped by tar and pea gravel. Beneath the mansard, which formed the third tier of apartments whose windows protruded past the slope of shingles, the building was a mixture of brick and plaster designed to look old-fashioned and match the name: Camelot West. It looked like the biggest job Ace had landed yet, and I was disappointed that the work force was the same size and had the same faces.
When I arrived, pulling the van into position at the far end of the parking lot, the crew was just finishing for the day. The boss, heavyset with a skin tanned boot dark, gestured where to leave the equipment for the next day’s work, and I watched as they meticulously stored the stiff mops and spreaders near a series of vent pipes on the roof, and telescoped the long aluminum ladders and shoved them into the truck bed. Then they caravaned out, leaving the tar trailer parked at a far edge—first the pickup, then a Chevrolet Camaro spotted with primer and rumbling deeply. I pulled in behind, giving them plenty of room in the heavy traffic of late afternoon.
Knowing pretty much where they were headed, I could afford to drop back out of sight and move up only for periodic checks. The quickest route was Wadsworth north, and that’s what they took, avoiding the tangle of downtown traffic that always clogged the I-70—I-25 mousetrap at rush hour. By the time we crossed over the Boulder turnpike, traffic thinned enough for me to stay far behind and still keep them in sight. They made the expected turn onto U.S. 287 North, but instead of turning off east toward Erie and the Wilcox farm, they passed one road after another and headed for Longmont. At the southern edge of the town and before they reached the city limits, where car dealers and fast-food restaurants crowded the frontage, they pulled into the graveled lot of a small, nondescript box of a building with two high windows on each side of a single door. Above the door a painted sign read
CACTUS LOUNGE
. In one of the windows was a red Coors sign; another said
TOPLESS DANCING EVERY WEEKEND
. A clutch of gleaming Harley choppers had been backed against the grimy brown of the bar’s stucco.
Cruising past, I watched the roofing crew, now wearing muscle shirts or sweats, climb out of the cars and go in, their boots swinging stiffly through the dust of the parking area.
It took about five minutes to find a place to turn around and get back into the traffic on 287. Then I pulled the van into a dirt lane and parked, just able to see the front and side of the Cactus. If I was lucky, Taylor had ridden one of those hogs, and whenever they were through with whatever brought the gang together, he would come out and climb on and ride off into the sunset, my videocam recording him. But I wasn’t lucky. Instead, another pickup truck wheeled into the parking lot after about ten minutes, and Taylor, grinning at something the driver said, climbed out of the rider’s seat and followed the man through the narrow door.
I filmed it anyway, the telephoto lens bringing the bearded face close enough to read his lips. They said something like, “Shit, man, not me,” and then they were in the doorway. It wasn’t enough for a case, and it would help the defense more than the plaintiff because it didn’t rule out any handicap. But it was the best I was going to do this day, and wearily I headed back to Denver.
Bunch reached the office about the same time I did. He’d managed to learn a little more about Antibodies Research and a lot more about their possibilities for profits.
“That’s better than I did.”
“Still no Taylor?”
“Not what we need. I found him out at a local bikers’ bar, but he was just riding in a truck.”
“Party time?”
“I’m not sure. Looked like a meet of some kind—a lot of choppers and cars, no women. Maybe fun, maybe business, maybe both.”
Bunch wagged his head. “I’d like to finish that one up soon.”
“We’d better finish it soon. And the right way, if we ever want to work for Schute again.”
“Maybe we could trade: Taylor for the dog. Hell, the dog’s worth more—they might do it.”
“Right.” I poured a cup of acidic coffee. “What’d you get on Antibodies?”
“Not too much. But I did find out there’s more money in bits and pieces, even, than organs.”
“Better spell that out for me, Bunch.”
“Cells. There’s a whole market for human cells and no laws governing it. What they do is take the living leftovers from surgery and turn them into something called ‘cell lines.’ That’s a culture that can live for a while. Like a mold, maybe. They grow enough to make panels for diagnostic kits, then use the kits to test the effects of hormones or drugs or cosmetics on human skin cells. It was a six-hundred-million-dollar business last year, Dev.”
“Where’d you find this out?”
“There’s a place up in Boulder I heard about, so I drove up and asked. What they do is sell human skin-cell cultures to cosmetics companies for research. The lady I talked to said they get a lot of their material from babies’ foreskins, for God’s sake.”
“They sell the foreskins?”
“No—they buy them and extract the cells from the foreskins. Then they make clones of the cells and turn them into test kits for researchers who want to find out how a cosmetic’s going to react on human skin. You can only use a kit one time for one chemical compound, and each kit costs about two fifty. That’s two hundred and fifty. They did over a million dollars’ worth of business last year.”
“Did they buy anything from Antibodies Research?”
“No. But she says she’s heard of them.” Bunch shook his head. “You know some outfits even use appendixes and tonsils and tumors? Tumors are really important for testing cancer drugs. Not this company but other ones. She said there’s more than three hundred and fifty companies working with these things.” He added, “They’re going into artificial skin.”
“What?”
“Artificial skin. Skin replacement for burns and abrasions. Human skin’s so hard to get and so expensive that this Boulder company’s trying to develop a skin substitute. Says they’ll do it too.” He sniffed something from his sinuses and spit it out the window. “There went fifty bucks, I’ll bet. You want to know what the big thing is I found out?”
“Well, yes, Bunch. I do.”
“Tissue from aborted fetuses. I talked to one of the researchers over at University Hospital. The guy’s a real hysteric about the virtues of fetal tissue implants. Diabetes, sickle cell anemia, stroke, spinal cord injuries, some cancers, and kinds of blindness—to hear the guy, fetal tissue can cure just about anything.” Bunch told me why that tissue was better than other kinds of transplants. “It doesn’t get rejected by the patient so easily. What they do is take a little bit of fetal tissue and graft it into a patient’s body where it’s needed. Tissue from a fetal pancreas, for instance—they’ll graft it onto an adult diabetic’s pancreas where it grows into what they call an islet. Pretty soon, the patient’s pancreas is making the sugar and hormones or whatever it didn’t used to produce. Bingo—no more insulin shots. For a while, anyway, but they still haven’t found a way to make the islet permanently effective. He told me about experiments with bone marrow implants for leukemia, brain implants for Parkinson’s disease, a lot of stuff, Dev. It’s really amazing!”
“Where do they get the fetuses?”
“From clearinghouses. But he’s really worried. The government’s banned experiments using aborted fetuses in the National Institutes of Health. The ban doesn’t apply directly to private research laboratories, but he says nobody’s going to continue experiments that the federal government calls unethical.” He popped his knuckles in the way he had when he was feeling agitated. “Somebody with leukemia, like this buddy of mine who got it in college—played football his freshman year, and you should have seen him six months later—I mean somebody like that, they’ve come close to getting a cure for. And now the government says it’s unethical. It’s playing politics with people’s lives, Dev. That’s the shitty thing about it—they call it unethical not for medical reasons but for political reasons. The antiabortion people.”
I wanted to get a point clear before moving into philosophical areas. “They have a clearinghouse for fetuses?”
“Aborted ones. This guy said it’s cadaverous tissue. No different from a dead adult. And the collector gets the consent of the mother to use the fetus and to make it available only to researchers sanctioned by NIH—who can’t do those kinds of experiments anymore.”
“These are fetuses already aborted.”
“Yeah. The abortion procedure tears up a fetus anyway, he said, and they take the parts that would be cremated and turn them into tissue for research and transplant surgery. They don’t get tissue from intact fetuses, he said.”
“Serafina and Felicidad were pregnant. Very pregnant.”
Bunch nodded. “I asked him about that. He said it’s not the same thing. He said intact fetuses could be really useful, but ‘harvesting’ intact fetuses for their organs … . Well”—Bunch leaned against the window railing—“he did tell me that anencephalic babies are sometimes used for organs with the parents’ permission. They’re the ones born with just a brain stem—they’re alive, but the poor kids have no brains and they’ll die in a few hours anyway. He said there’s maybe two or three thousand a year born that way who could be kept alive on life support long enough to get their organs. A hospital out in California—Cerro Lindo—already used the heart from one. In fact, there’s a proposed law in California to declare anencephalics dead at birth so their organs can be taken while they’re still breathing.”
A living organ bank. “So there’s money to be made from intact fetuses.”
“He said baby organs are really rare because a lot of parents just don’t want to donate—I guess that means high demand and low supply: classic profit situation, right? But even aborted fetal tissue is a gold mine. There’s this private lab out in Alameda, California, purifies insulin-producing cells from aborted fetuses and makes a onetime treatment for diabetics. Dev, the treatment alone costs five thousand dollars, plus doctors’ fees and hospital time. This outfit’s projecting revenues of four hundred million dollars within the next five years. And that’s only the beginning.”
Vaguely, I recalled reading somewhere about a diabetic woman in Minnesota who wanted to get pregnant and abort so the fetus’s pancreas could be grafted to hers. “Where do people get intact fetuses?”
“My man didn’t know. Or said he didn’t, anyway. He only works with the aborted ones. I asked him about the clearinghouses but he got pretty vague. Only thing he said was that biological experiments and research were government-regulated. I got the feeling, in fact, that he didn’t want to talk about that part of it.” He pushed off the rail and walked restlessly back and forth between the desk and the door. “My guess is that clearinghouses get their fetus supply from abortion clinics. I mean, where else could they get a steady supply? Some states require abortionists to get the mother’s permission to dispose of the fetus. But there’s not much said about how it’s disposed of, and I can’t figure anybody wanting to take it home with her. Hell, suppose a clearinghouse opened a chain of abortion mills and got its tissue that way? God knows, they’d be making a fortune at both ends.” He thought a minute. “Maybe it’s a good thing the government’s pulling NIH out of it—competition drives the price up, some company might start paying women to have abortions.” Then he shook his head, remembering. “But I keep seeing my buddy in college—the one with leukemia. If he’d just had a chance … .”