Human organ trafficking

What You Need to Know About Human Organ Trafficking

There’s that urban legend. You go to dinner with a good looking stranger, go back to their hotel room or yours, have a drink, and pass out. The next thing you know, you are in the bathtub, naked, covered in ice, with a poorly stitched side, and a phone nearby with a note attached. The note warns you to seek emergency medical care right away. According to medical anthropologist Nancy Scherper-Hughes, the truth is different, but is just as sinister and macabre, and tells us something about the state of global affairs today.

Nancy Scherper-Hughes has been working on the problem of human organ and tissue trafficking for a full decade. Yes, it is real, and it’s probably happening at a hospital near you. Encapsulated within is a travesty of justice, an argument over global equality, and the dark, secretive underbelly of medical science, which few of us have dared to peak at. Today, Scherper-Hughes is the director of Organ’s Watch, a nonprofit that keeps track of global organ trafficking. She is also the chair of Berkeley's doctoral program in medical anthropology.