Accused Chinese Organ Harvester Lurks in Transplant Community
Bounced Papers
TTS does not allow research presented at its conferences if the source of the organs used in the research was questionable; attendees of the congress from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were made to sign a declaration to that effect.
One result of this rule was that “seven or eight” papers from the PRC were bounced, according to Dr. Jay Lavee.
One result of this rule was that “seven or eight” papers from the PRC were bounced, according to Dr. Jay Lavee, head of the heart transplant unit at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel. Lavee made the remark as an audience member during a July 18 conference held by Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, a medical advocacy group, which prepared its own panel in Berlin to shadow the TTS congress.
The rule also led to Chen submitting a paper on research on mice, rather than humans, because the latter would have been inadmissible under TTS rules, according to an email from a TTS member that was familiar with the situation, sent to David Matas.
For TTS, this is a desirable level of distance from the practices they oppose.
Matas says the TTS needs to be stricter.
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“There’s a question here: these people are involved in transplant abuse, so what are they doing at these conferences when they are involved in disreputable research?”
Part of the reason for the prohibition is so that the TTS is not directly complicit in the abuse of organ transplantation.
But Matas says that it is also important not to “give any status of respectability to people involved in disreputable behavior.”
Presentations like this are flaunted as part of a curriculum vitae, or on the doctors’ websites, Matas says. “They don’t just use it for research on mice. They’re actively involved in transplant tourism, with high fees, and part of that is ‘Well, I spoke at the Berlin Congress.’ The idea that it’s alright because they spoke on mice is cutting a fine line.”
TTS guidelines also say, “No transplant surgeon/team shall be involved directly or indirectly in the buying or selling of organs/tissues.”
Whose Organs
It is widely known that most of the organ transplantations performed in China come from executed prisoners. However, it has been a subject of contention as to who, precisely, is being executed.
A growing body of evidence has suggested that primary targets for organ harvesting operations have been practitioners of Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, involves doing five meditative exercises and living according to teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Because of its rapid growth in popularity—in 1999 more people practiced Falun Gong in China than were members of the Communist Party, and because of fear that the people of China would prefer Falun Gong’s traditional moral teachings to communist ideology, the then-head of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin began persecuting Falun Gong practitioners in July 1999.
Matas and Kilgour’s book Bloody Harvest links the forced, live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners directly to the persecution.
The ability to perform 10,000 transplantations per year at prearranged times, as China does, implies the existence of a pool of roughly 150,000 people ready to be executed, because of the need for blood and tissue matching with the recipient, according to Damon Noto, M.D., a spokesperson for Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, in remarks given at a recent forum on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Researchers say that the Falun Gong prison population is being used to provide this donor pool.
Chen has been accused of participating in this vast scheme. He could not be reached for comment on this article.
For advocates, the gravity of the charges calls for more than a perfunctory response from TTS.
“It’s unbelievable that a professor of medicine, who is supposed to protect human lives, is actively committing crimes against humanity,” wrote Waltraud Ng, the spokesperson for the German Falun Dafa Information Center, in an email. “To prevent unethical doctors from attending a congress like this, only those who sign the Membership Statement of The Transplantation Society should be allowed to join.”
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