Parts Unknown

by Rex Burns

  Cruising past, I watched the roofing crew, now wearing muscle shirts or sweats, climb out of the cars and go in, their boots swinging stiffly through the dust of the parking area.

  It took about five minutes to find a place to turn around and get back into the traffic on 287. Then I pulled the van into a dirt lane and parked, just able to see the front and side of the Cactus. If I was lucky, Taylor had ridden one of those hogs, and whenever they were through with whatever brought the gang together, he would come out and climb on and ride off into the sunset, my videocam recording him. But I wasn’t lucky. Instead, another pickup truck wheeled into the parking lot after about ten minutes, and Taylor, grinning at something the driver said, climbed out of the rider’s seat and followed the man through the narrow door.

  I filmed it anyway, the telephoto lens bringing the bearded face close enough to read his lips. They said something like, “Shit, man, not me,” and then they were in the doorway. It wasn’t enough for a case, and it would help the defense more than the plaintiff because it didn’t rule out any handicap. But it was the best I was going to do this day, and wearily I headed back to Denver.

  Bunch reached the office about the same time I did. He’d managed to learn a little more about Antibodies Research and a lot more about their possibilities for profits.

  “That’s better than I did.”

  “Still no Taylor?”

  “Not what we need. I found him out at a local bikers’ bar, but he was just riding in a truck.”

  “Party time?”

  “I’m not sure. Looked like a meet of some kind—a lot of choppers and cars, no women. Maybe fun, maybe business, maybe both.”

  Bunch wagged his head. “I’d like to finish that one up soon.”

  “We’d better finish it soon. And the right way, if we ever want to work for Schute again.”

  “Maybe we could trade: Taylor for the dog. Hell, the dog’s worth more—they might do it.”

  “Right.” I poured a cup of acidic coffee. “What’d you get on Antibodies?”

  “Not too much. But I did find out there’s more money in bits and pieces, even, than organs.”

  “Better spell that out for me, Bunch.”

  “Cells. There’s a whole market for human cells and no laws governing it. What they do is take the living leftovers from surgery and turn them into something called ‘cell lines.’ That’s a culture that can live for a while. Like a mold, maybe. They grow enough to make panels for diagnostic kits, then use the kits to test the effects of hormones or drugs or cosmetics on human skin cells. It was a six-hundred-million-dollar business last year, Dev.”

  “Where’d you find this out?”

  “There’s a place up in Boulder I heard about, so I drove up and asked. What they do is sell human skin-cell cultures to cosmetics companies for research. The lady I talked to said they get a lot of their material from babies’ foreskins, for God’s sake.”

  “They sell the foreskins?”

  “No—they buy them and extract the cells from the foreskins. Then they make clones of the cells and turn them into test kits for researchers who want to find out how a cosmetic’s going to react on human skin. You can only use a kit one time for one chemical compound, and each kit costs about two fifty. That’s two hundred and fifty. They did over a million dollars’ worth of business last year.”

  “Did they buy anything from Antibodies Research?”

  “No. But she says she’s heard of them.” Bunch shook his head. “You know some outfits even use appendixes and tonsils and tumors? Tumors are really important for testing cancer drugs. Not this company but other ones. She said there’s more than three hundred and fifty companies working with these things.” He added, “They’re going into artificial skin.”

  “What?”

  “Artificial skin. Skin replacement for burns and abrasions. Human skin’s so hard to get and so expensive that this Boulder company’s trying to develop a skin substitute. Says they’ll do it too.” He sniffed something from his sinuses and spit it out the window. “There went fifty bucks, I’ll bet. You want to know what the big thing is I found out?”

  “Well, yes, Bunch. I do.”

  “Tissue from aborted fetuses. I talked to one of the researchers over at University Hospital. The guy’s a real hysteric about the virtues of fetal tissue implants. Diabetes, sickle cell anemia, stroke, spinal cord injuries, some cancers, and kinds of blindness—to hear the guy, fetal tissue can cure just about anything.” Bunch told me why that tissue was better than other kinds of transplants. “It doesn’t get rejected by the patient so easily. What they do is take a little bit of fetal tissue and graft it into a patient’s body where it’s needed. Tissue from a fetal pancreas, for instance—they’ll graft it onto an adult diabetic’s pancreas where it grows into what they call an islet. Pretty soon, the patient’s pancreas is making the sugar and hormones or whatever it didn’t used to produce. Bingo—no more insulin shots. For a while, anyway, but they still haven’t found a way to make the islet permanently effective. He told me about experiments with bone marrow implants for leukemia, brain implants for Parkinson’s disease, a lot of stuff, Dev. It’s really amazing!”

  “Where do they get the fetuses?”

  “From clearinghouses. But he’s really worried. The government’s banned experiments using aborted fetuses in the National Institutes of Health. The ban doesn’t apply directly to private research laboratories, but he says nobody’s going to continue experiments that the federal government calls unethical.” He popped his knuckles in the way he had when he was feeling agitated. “Somebody with leukemia, like this buddy of mine who got it in college—played football his freshman year, and you should have seen him six months later—I mean somebody like that, they’ve come close to getting a cure for. And now the government says it’s unethical. It’s playing politics with people’s lives, Dev. That’s the shitty thing about it—they call it unethical not for medical reasons but for political reasons. The antiabortion people.”

  I wanted to get a point clear before moving into philosophical areas. “They have a clearinghouse for fetuses?”

  “Aborted ones. This guy said it’s cadaverous tissue. No different from a dead adult. And the collector gets the consent of the mother to use the fetus and to make it available only to researchers sanctioned by NIH—who can’t do those kinds of experiments anymore.”

  “These are fetuses already aborted.”

  “Yeah. The abortion procedure tears up a fetus anyway, he said, and they take the parts that would be cremated and turn them into tissue for research and transplant surgery. They don’t get tissue from intact fetuses, he said.”

  “Serafina and Felicidad were pregnant. Very pregnant.”

  Bunch nodded. “I asked him about that. He said it’s not the same thing. He said intact fetuses could be really useful, but ‘harvesting’ intact fetuses for their organs … . Well”—Bunch leaned against the window railing—“he did tell me that anencephalic babies are sometimes used for organs with the parents’ permission. They’re the ones born with just a brain stem—they’re alive, but the poor kids have no brains and they’ll die in a few hours anyway. He said there’s maybe two or three thousand a year born that way who could be kept alive on life support long enough to get their organs. A hospital out in California—Cerro Lindo—already used the heart from one. In fact, there’s a proposed law in California to declare anencephalics dead at birth so their organs can be taken while they’re still breathing.”

  A living organ bank. “So there’s money to be made from intact fetuses.”

  “He said baby organs are really rare because a lot of parents just don’t want to donate—I guess that means high demand and low supply: classic profit situation, right? But even aborted fetal tissue is a gold mine. There’s this private lab out in Alameda, California, purifies insulin-producing cells from aborted fetuses and makes a onetime treatment for diabetics. Dev, the treatment alone costs five thousand dollars, plus doctors�
�� fees and hospital time. This outfit’s projecting revenues of four hundred million dollars within the next five years. And that’s only the beginning.”

  Vaguely, I recalled reading somewhere about a diabetic woman in Minnesota who wanted to get pregnant and abort so the fetus’s pancreas could be grafted to hers. “Where do people get intact fetuses?”

  “My man didn’t know. Or said he didn’t, anyway. He only works with the aborted ones. I asked him about the clearinghouses but he got pretty vague. Only thing he said was that biological experiments and research were government-regulated. I got the feeling, in fact, that he didn’t want to talk about that part of it.” He pushed off the rail and walked restlessly back and forth between the desk and the door. “My guess is that clearinghouses get their fetus supply from abortion clinics. I mean, where else could they get a steady supply? Some states require abortionists to get the mother’s permission to dispose of the fetus. But there’s not much said about how it’s disposed of, and I can’t figure anybody wanting to take it home with her. Hell, suppose a clearinghouse opened a chain of abortion mills and got its tissue that way? God knows, they’d be making a fortune at both ends.” He thought a minute. “Maybe it’s a good thing the government’s pulling NIH out of it—competition drives the price up, some company might start paying women to have abortions.” Then he shook his head, remembering. “But I keep seeing my buddy in college—the one with leukemia. If he’d just had a chance … .”

  To get whole organs—baby organs—instead of just the tissue, you needed a whole child, not just the bits and pieces vacuumed out during an abortion. A seven-or eight-month-old fetus, alive in the womb, organs already formed and working, heart a rapid thump through the stethoscope, and then a cesarean, a quick cut for the desired organ—transport it to the waiting patient, and everybody’s happy. Except the mother, but then her organs and bones and flesh could turn a tidy profit, too. You only needed a pregnant woman that no one would miss.

  “How do we get inside the Antibodies building, Bunch?”

  “Uh huh. I figured you might want to do that.” We both thought of what we had seen: a compact building whose windowless brick wall faced the street through the heavy chain-link fence that guarded the grounds. “Right now, I’d say we go in through the roof. But you can bet your Aunt Hetty’s long johns they’ve got some humongous protection around that place.”

  CHAPTER 12

  PERCY AHERN WAS an ex-Secret Service agent. I had been assigned to work with him when I finished up at Bellesville, and that year’s tour had been the best of the lot. After serving his twenty, he—like a lot of ex-agents—set up his own investigation business; but his was in New York, where business was considerably better. We kept in touch—he did favors for us there; we did favors for him in the Rocky Mountain region. We both liked the arrangement better than going through the World Association of Detectives directory. For one thing, we trusted each other’s work; for another, if the favor didn’t involve a lot of time or overhead, it was done for free—a consideration more important some times than others. This was not one of the others. I called him and left a message on his tape recorder for any information on Empire State Hospital and their request for an Rh null donor. Please expedite if possible.

  Bunch, too, had a telephone call to make and I listened while he asked the health service if Sid Vicious had shown any signs of rabies. Hanging up, he smiled. “We can pick him up. He’s clean as a hound’s tooth!”

  “It’s a relief to me, too, Bunch. I wouldn’t want you chewing my shin.”

  “I wouldn’t chew that soup bone if I did have rabies. Nobody else would, either.” He patted his thigh. “It was my leg the dog went after: quality and quantity in massive portions.”

  I gave him advice on what to do with his massive portions, and we spent an hour or so getting the gear organized for the evening’s excursion. When I locked the office for the day, I swung downtown to the Denver Public Library and wandered through the medical section to do a little light reading. The University Medical Center library would have more texts, I knew, but they would probably be both too technical and too narrowly focused. What I wanted was an overview in layman’s language of the transplant technology and especially its business side.

  I found almost nothing on the business aspect, but was luckier with the medical. One tome let me know that the total number of organ transplants rose to a hundred thousand in 1988 while the estimated number of new people awaiting transplant each year hovered around thirty-three thousand, and that only about 10 percent of the year’s cadavers provided organs. A more technical book pointed out that the success rate on liver transplants from cadavers was 80 percent in the late 1980s, while the success rate on liver transplants from living donors was 95 percent. One text testified that the two principal aims in transplant surgery were to minimize the genetic distance between recipient and donor and to suppress the recipient’s immune rejection mechanism. The first area was one of genetic classification and matching rather than modification: select the best donor (a young healthy twin, if you were lucky), then compare the tissues of donor and recipient to find the closest match. The chapter went into greater detail about the methods and codes used to classify various kinds of tissue, and the several ways to type blood. It offered tables of probability of success based on various combinations. Rh null didn’t show up on any of the tables.

  In the area of immune rejection, the history of the development of various chemicals to overcome the body’s rejection of foreign objects was detailed and buttressed with panels of statistics. In recent years, the discovery of cyclosporin A increased organ transplant success dramatically. However, no one agent seemed to be totally effective. So combinations of prednisone, Imuran, antilymph serum, monoclonal antibodies, and cyclosporin A provided a pharmacology that approached 90 percent effectiveness even in using cadaver grafts. The rate went up when the donor was alive. Unfortunately, the cost of medications was quite high, adding to the expense of already costly operations. It had reached a point, in fact, where economics was superseding medical considerations as the determinant of who would or would not receive a transplant.

  The article ended in a plea for more research, recently cut back by government belt-tightening, and that led to the next book, one which focused on areas of medical exploration. One dramatic area was the transplantation of cells from a normal brain to brains that had lost the capacity to generate certain chemicals, and I recalled what Bunch had told me from his interview. Such diseases as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s showed short-term favorable reaction when chemical-producing cells were transplanted as islets; however, the long-term results tended to be negligible as the diseased brain gradually killed off the new cells and the disease reasserted itself. Research on why the transplanted cells died had been slowed by the government prohibition on using fetal tissue. Other similar research also affected by the prohibition included islet-cell transplant for certain types of diabetes and even some forms of trauma effects. Areas in which exploration was only in the beginning stages were the search for the chemical causes and cures of such psychological disorders as schizophrenia and severe depression, and the use of animal organs for xenograft transplant to human recipients. Recently, a genetically engineered protein was discovered to kill transplant-attacking cells in mice, offering hope of a cheaper, more effective way to overcome the body’s rejection system.

  I didn’t find much on fetal tissue transplants or on the clearinghouse business. But the information I did find supported what Bunch had reported, and led to the same conclusion about the possibilities for major profit by private scientific laboratories, especially those who might ignore the NIH prohibition.

  What it boiled down to was a tremendous industry of research, application, and development that promised unimaginable benefits for tens of thousands of diseased people. It also showed a very expensive and often ill-governed process involving many, many people in public and private institutions, not all of whom wou
ld be in it for purely altruistic reasons. In fact, several major drug manufacturers here and abroad were investing millions in the chemical areas of transplant research, in the hopes of making billions in return. Reputations for the researchers and vast profits for the sponsors were there to be won, and because of this there was a temptation not to look too closely at the means of achievement.

  The hours hunched over the library table had made me stiff, and I stopped at the health club to stretch and work up a sweat on the lifting machines and to jog around the track until the manager flicked the lights to tell the few remaining clients it was closing time. Then I drove over to an Italian restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood where Bunch would be waiting.

  Little Pepina’s was one of the few restaurants in Denver that always gathered a late-night crowd, and I had to search among the talking, eating faces for Bunch. Finally, he raised an arm from across the room and I worked my way over.

  “Calamari to start with.” He dished a spoonful onto my waiting plate from the hot crockery bowl. “Then the pasta.” Between mouthfuls he told me that we were set for our visit to Antibodies. “Everything’s in the van. Got your stuff?”

  I nodded, mouth full.

  “Something else I figure we should do too.”

  “What’s that?”