No respect
Telegraph | News | Alistair Cooke’s bones stolen by transplant gang — This is one wild story that seems to be getting a lot of play in Europe.
Relatives of Alistair Cooke, the late broadcaster, have spoken of their revulsion after it was found that his bones were cut from his body by a criminal gang and sold for transplant tissue.
New York police said his body was one of dozens chopped up for profit by rogue morticians in Brooklyn.
After presenting BBC radio’s Letter from America for more than half a century, Cooke died in March last year of lung cancer, aged 95.
The “body-snatchers”, as the New York tabloids call them, surgically carved out his bones the day after he died, said the Daily News. His remains were then returned to the family for cremation.
Unnamed sources said the bones were sold for more than $7,000 to two tissue processing companies for use in transplant operations
Again? How many sets of bones did Cooke have?
Some dim yobs who thought he was Alistair Crowley…
These products are very expensive and limited, so greed will be there. In the future perhaps automatic legalized harvest after death in hospital would end this and help those in need of transplants. It would take a fundamental shift in the current attitudes of death. The only thing that matters in an open coffin viewing is the head and hands. You can’t even tell if a body has had a post mortem unless the mortician is really inept.
Master’s Pieces Theater.
RBG
#4. Did you REALLY have to say that…I hurt myself laughing !
OTOH, If cancer is a disease, weren’t these diseased bones/tissue ?
Still pretty yucky thing to do. Life is cheap but, death ain’t…..
Its not like he is going to miss them. They ought to make organ / tissue havesting manditory.. well until we can either grow them in vats, or we can execute Chinese locally for our tissue needs.
Just read a similar item in today’s Detroit Free Press:
http://tinyurl.co.uk/pbo2
Body parts can total $250,000 on the market. I wonder if I could get an advance on that?
I intend to skip the middleman and donate my body to science so the hospital would have a vested interest in keeping tabs on my parts until they could be used in a responsible fashion. Hopefully that will keep my stuff kept out of organlegger’s hands.
7 I wonder if I could get an advance on that?
Sweet!
Kind of like buying an annuity from an insurance company, but using rights to your body as payment?
Sounds good until I remember Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, and the skit about the Liver Donor being asked for his liver… 🙂