🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <94121.154304U58563@uicvm.uic.edu>,
 <U58563@uicvm.uic.edu> wisely conceals his/her name while posting:

>   I've heard of an unknown malefactor in New York who kidnaps people and
>removes a kidney, taking efforts to preserve their lives.
	Let me get this straight: you're saying that there is a renegade
surgeon with his own aseptic operating room, post-surgical intensive care
unit, expensive instruments, and a criminally conspiratorial cooperating
team of anesthesiologists and variously trained nurses, who kidnap people
to steal *just* one kidney from each victim? No one misses them for the
week or so they're abducted, during which they are tissue-typed, operated
upon & recovering? The kidnap victim/patient isn't able to identify *any*
of the people who worked on him, or his silence was bought with a share
of the organ sale profits? The whole idea is patently absurd. Can anyone
else say "Urban Legend"?

Mark

(Believing that fiction is best identified as such, I will point
out that black markets in transplant organs using illegal & involuntary
donation were pivotal to Robin Cook's novel-turned-movie "Coma" and to
quite a few stories in Larry Niven's "Known Space" series.)
-- 
Mark D. Garfinkel (e-mail: garfinkl@iitmax.acc.iit.edu)
My views are my own, which is why they're copyright (c) 1994

In article <1994May3.151257.11429@iitmax.iit.edu>, garfinkl@iitmax.iit.edu (Mark
D. Garfinkel) says:
>        Let me get this straight: you're saying that there is a renegade
>surgeon with his own aseptic operating room, post-surgical intensive care
>unit, expensive instruments, and a criminally conspiratorial cooperating
>team of anesthesiologists and variously trained nurses, who kidnap people
>to steal *just* one kidney from each victim? No one misses them for the
Well, all right, maybe I was a little quick to accept this one, though it
didn't help that I'd heard a number of other people accept it as fact...
Still, I don't think the scenario is quite as implausible as you suggest.  The
tissue typing would already have been done, and in the database, before the
personwould ever have been abducted.  When I heard it, I assumed that there
must be some way in which one or two medical professionals could convince the
others doing the operation that there would be some good reason why the donor
would have been under general anaesthesia all the while they were with him...
It seems like a few carefully planned lies could at least conceivably go a long
way.I've heard enough stories about people receiving the wrong operation
while unconscious, though I suspected those to be UL's even before.
   The other way in which such a scenario could be plausible has to do with
that simple little English word that is so commonly accepted and used:
"Billionaire".   Take a typical billionaire like H. Ross Perot, who is said to
have something like 3 billion in assets.  Ignoring adjustments for inflation or
interest, that's what an average American would earn in a little over 100,000
YEARS.  I'll leave the estimate for a person in a Third World country, who
might make about $400 U.S. in a year, as an exercise for the reader!  Yet such
persons have perfectly functional kidneys!  Their local clinics may lack the
money to immunize people for yellow fever, and have to watch people die by the
dozens or the hundreds... How much would it take to bribe such a doctor,
anyway?  Even in America, what would a person do for a million dollars?
Well, H.Ross Perot could pay that out 3,000 times over again!  And if a person
were about to die for the lack of a kidney, wouldn't he be willing to spend
everything he had if need be, to be able to have one?  [Yes, I realize, it
would be difficult for someone to spend ALL their assets in a short time...
But a good-sized chunk would be enough!]
   Consider that liver that was so quickly available for the governor of
Pennsylvania.  And he was small fry!  By contrast, H. Ross Perot almost bought
the presidency, with no other qualifications!
I don't think I'm being *completely* ridiculous in supposing such a thing is
possible, at least in theory.