Berkeley Professor speaks on Organ trafficking

Lecture brings up human rights issues

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a medical anthropology professor at the University of California – Berkeley, will give a speech on Saturday about the global issue of organ trafficking. Scheper-Hughes is the distinguished lecturer for the anthropology department this year and her speech follows an earlier, smaller presentation that she gave on Friday.

Scheper-Hughes is the co-founder and director of Organs Watch, an organization that seeks to promote human rights and deal with the worldwide issue of organ trafficking. She is also on the World Health Organization advisory panel on global transplant safety and ethics and a member of the Asian Task Force on Combating Traffic in Humans for Organs.

Donna Goldstein, an associate professor of anthropology, is a previous student of Scheper-Hughes. She asked her mentor to speak at CU, a university that the anthropologist hadn’t visited in nearly a decade.

“She’s one of the most interesting minds I know,” Goldstein said. “Having her here is just pure pleasure.”

Scheper-Hughes’ lecture on Friday, titled “The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life and the Medically Disappeared,” covered her investigative work in Argentina, where she went undercover with a private investigator in order to look into the suspicious reports about a local mental institution.

These reports included allegations that blood, tissue and organs were being taken from patients at the institution. Thousands of patients have disappeared over the years, with bodies turning up periodically in a nearby well or forest.

Scheper-Hughes said that these disappearances gained little attention in the area because the patients are “no-names” or “ex-humans.” They are people who were neglected and ignored by society, the ones without anyone to care for them.

She is now attempting to get the Argentina forensic group to do a dig at a swamp near the mental institution where more bodies are expected to be found in a mass unmarked grave.

“It is one of those projects I feel I didn’t choose, it chose me,” she said.

Scheper-Hughes emphasized the importance of human rights and how those rights are often violated all around the world. In situations like that in Montes de Oca, organ traffickers target the “invisible victims” of society. These people, she said, have human rights that are not being protected.

She also recognized, however, that merely talking about the subject won’t necessarily cause any major changes.

“Human rights discourses are sometimes weak,” she said. “They’re not enough.”

Scheper-Hughes said that the issue of organ trafficking is difficult to address because “it’s not trafficking for bad, it’s trafficking for good.”

While thousands of people die in the process, thousands more also live. She said that it is the issue of human rights that makes this practice so wrong.

“What motivates me is a sense of justice and of global injustice,” she said.

Robert Carney, a junior majoring in anthropology, was interested by this question of ethics involved in the subject.

“It’s a bad thing, but for a good purpose, so how do we judge it?” he said.

Katy Putsavage, a graduate student studying anthropology, said she enjoyed Scheper-Hughes’ lecture.

“Human rights issues are always so complicated,” she said. “(Scheper-Hughes) gives it a unique perspective.”

Saturday’s lecture will take place at 7 p.m. in Hale 270 and will be followed by a reception. This presentation is also open to the public at no cost and will cover organ trafficking on a more global scale.

Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Kaely Moore at kaely.moore@colorado.edu