A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 17

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: The Big Black Market for Spare Human Body Parts.

In February of 2012, two duct-taped camping coolers — the kind you might take on a picnic — arrived at Delta Cargo, a freight-shipping warehouse on the northeast side of Detroit Metro airport. The airline’s ground crew tossed the coolers onto a pallet in a climate-controlled storage area. But the tape split, and a reddish liquid splattered out. Because the shipment was said to contain “five human heads with necks, two torsos, and one whole body,” it soon proved to be an expensive leak, requiring extensive biohazard remediation.

Not long after, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation named Paul Micah Johnson arrived to inspect the cargo with Elizabeth Harton, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quarantine officer. It seemed improbable that an entire body could fit inside two picnic coolers, so they pried open the lids. Inside were eight human heads, wrapped in trash bags and sitting in what appeared to be pools of blood. Eight faces, no names.

The United States is an excellent place to be in the body business. By one 2007 estimate, 20,000 human bodies are donated here annually. These donations come about directly. You can bequeath your body to anatomical gift programs operated by many universities, and you may become the “first patient” a surgeon operates on. Donations can also be arranged after death, through a network of independent firms, although in such cases your family may have only a vague notion of where your body will end up. Brokers do business with other brokers, who work with funeral homes and crematoriums that, in turn, get referrals from hospice centers — all of which means that, invariably, some donated remains end up dismembered, beheaded, and shipped around the world for profit.

You cannot legally sell a dead body — yours or anyone else’s. These brokers, instead, turn a profit off a corpse by charging for the service, not the actual goods. Their fees cover the “preparation” of cadaveric material as well as the “matching” and “placing” of remains. These re-allocation fees were once designed simply to cover the cost of transporting remains to and from medical schools. Today, a whole human cadaver can be broken down and parted out for as much as $100,000. It is shocking to learn how little federal oversight there is for these so-called non-transplant anatomical donations. Body parts are funneled to a wide range of researchers — anesthesiologists learning how to perform epidurals and sonograms; private firms training customers how to install a dental implant; pharmaceutical companies; scientists studying transcranial direct stimulation; engineers who still test crashes on real flesh and bone even as cars become autonomously controlled. Michel Anteby, a professor of organizational behavior at Boston University, conducted several studies on the industry. Small businesses have come to dominate the trade over the last 15 years, he says, and the rapid influx of entrepreneurial ventures transformed traditional anatomical exchanges into a bustling billion-dollar marketplace. “In some ways, it crystallizes American business and capitalism,” he says. “I know of no other country where you have a legal trade in human cadavers.”

Trafficking in body parts. I can definitely see that as a hook around which to build a movie. But what about a TV series? If HBO can do “Barry”, a show about a hit man trying to become an actor:

Why not a half-hour dark comedy series set in the world of the acquisition, sale, and distribution of body parts?

Is it like “Barry”: A manager and their body part transporter?

Is it a team of body part handlers a la the team in Repo Man:

Are there rival organizations? Is it a The Outfit vs. The Law? Who are the buyers? Medical schools. Human taxidermists. Weirdo religious cultists who believe in human resurrection. Death fetishists.

There you go, my seventeenth story idea for the month. This time a TV series concept. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.