Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist of international renown, first studied the phenomena of organ trafficking from the perspective of an urban myth. Her years of research however uncovered a system that is all too real.

In a rare interview with Three Monkeys Online Magazine, Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes talks about the international system of trafficking in human organs, where people from impoverished countries sell kidneys, eyes, and any other body part that can be transplanted, to international brokers.

It's a fascinating and disturbing story, and one in which Professor Scheper-Hughes is a renowned expert. It involves medical ethics, technology, and the law. It's also a far from clear cut story, inolving as it does the sick, the poor, and the businessmen in between.

"People have always been selling parts of themselves, hair, and teeth, so you can question whether there’s anything new about this, but of course, now, the technology is different. It’s inside the body as well as cutting off hair" says Professor Scheper-Hughes.

"In the Philippines there are whole slums where people have specialised in selling their body parts"

Some of the examples of the system include:
1) The voyage of tendons and tissue, removed without consent from cadavers in South Africa, that end up, via South Korea, in New York, being sold for upwards of $2,500 apiece.
2) The case of Moldovan villagers tricked into travelling to Turkey, under the premise of obtaining work, who were subsequently under threat of violence forced to 'donate' kidneys

Professor Scheper-Hughes first stumbled across organ trafficking when researching her critically acclaimed academic work "Death without weeping", published in 1992. She was a member of the Bellagio task force, reporting on organ trafficking to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and subsequently founded Organs Watch, a small non-Governmental organisation dedicated to the research and documentation of the worldwide system of organ trafficking.

Forget the urban myth, where a tourist enters a bar, talks to a pretty girl, and before he knows it he wakes up in a bath tub full of ice and minus a kidney. The reality of organ trafficking is more mundane, but no less horriffying.

Read the interview for free online at http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_organ_trafficking_interview_nancy_schepper-Hughes.htm

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Three Monkeys Online is a free current affairs/arts magazine produced by writers in Ireland, Italy and Spain, and read worldwide.