Bodysnatchers took Cooke's bones to sell for transplants

December 23, 2005

The family of the popular broadcaster were told by New York police that a gang made up to £4,000 by desecrating his body before cremation

THE bones of Alistair Cooke, the veteran Letter from America broadcaster, were stolen by a criminal gang trading in body parts the day before his cremation, New York police have told his family.

Mr Cooke’s family expressed their horror to The Times yesterday after being informed that his bones were removed by a surgeon the day after he died, and then allegedly sold for about $7,000 (£4,000) to two transplant companies.

Paperwork describing the bones, which were cancerous and too old for use in transplants, was reportedly altered to say they came from an 85-year-old man who had died of a heart attack.

Mr Cooke, who presented Letter from America on BBC Radio for 58 years, died at his Manhattan home in March last year of lung cancer that had spread to his bones.

Police believe that the following day, at the New York undertakers where Mr Cooke was taken, his body was cut open and his bones removed, before he was cremated.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1957702,00.html

He certainly deserved better care:(

spend a good long time in prison.

People who would exploit the bodies of the dead (and endanger other people in the process to boot!) = the lowest of the low.

Makes me all the happier that the surgeon who attended John Lennon had the whole area of the hospital where he was taken locked down and all articles related to the situation destroyed. Can you imagine the kind of crap they'd be selling on eBay today if he hadn't?

This is not a good development.

what a shame, that an elegant dignified man should have this happen. Or that it happens to ANYONE, let alone him.

Welcome to The Future!

it's awful I wonder who the rouge surgeon was, hope the ones responsible get caught... I ALSO want to know who's RECEIVING transplants from these suppliers.

Larry Niven in his "Near Space" novels described a crime called organlegging. These criminals kidnap people and cut them up for spare parts. Organized crime syndicates are heavily involved. It is a major problem in this universe Niven created.

I don't think it will be long in our universe before they move on from the dead to taking parts from people who are not dead--at least not dead before the crime! This will happen as medicine's understanding of transplanting body parts becomes greater, and more organs and parts can be transplanted. It is pure human nature! It won't be long before the police will be able to tell us the street value of a healthy pancreas. This may be dystopic and ghoulish, but the time will come.

On the other side of the coin, in Niven's universe, there is such a demand for organs for transplant that more and more crimes become capital. Executed criminals are broken up for spare parts. Will this happen? I don't know. It is a slippery slope.

harvest organs. Doctors have reported before the brain functions have ceased.

You can still get his "Jigsaw Man" short story in eBook form for less than a dollar: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook506.htm

He describes here the just punishment for a convicted organlegger:

"The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them. When the organlegger's body temperature reached a certain point, the belt started.

The first machine made a series of incisions in his chest. Skillfully and mechanically, the doctor performed a cardiectomy.

The organlegger was officially dead.

His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital's organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment's notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken."

it was about 4-5 years ago... a healthy child was going to be carved up for his body parts.

Bets are...it does happen especially in countries where people are really poor.

Not so much because of this specific case, but because it shows how potential donors, who get their consciouses blackmailed to make this so-called "gift," are nothing more than cogs for the industry that has sprung up around donations.

It's not a "gift" anymore, it's a commodity subject to the laws of supply and demand. I'd rather be worm-food. They demand little and don't engage in the 'oh it's a beautiful thing, you're doing,' myths about what a selfless act donation is.

I had mouth surgery and recieved a tissue graft from someone who had donated their skin/body to science...granted it wasn't as serious as someone getting a kidney but I am grateful as a result I didn't lose some of my teeth...

I have my ID card marked that I will not donate. I have a genuine concern about being carved up before it's my time go.

Consent forms fabricated. So, it wouldn't matter if the person was actually a donor or not.

The black market that's sprung up is the symptom: supply and demand of a commodity.

not only will they be entirely worthless to anyone else, they'll pay me to move away from them.

(I haven't forgotten you, Crisco. You're still not white icing.)