Scientific MOOCs follower. Author of Airpocalypse, a techno-medical thriller (Out Summer 2017)


Welcome to the digital era of biology (and to this modest blog I started in early 2005).

To cure many diseases, like cancer or cystic fibrosis, we will need to target genes (mutations, for ex.), not organs! I am convinced that the future of replacement medicine (organ transplant) is genomics (the science of the human genome). In 10 years we will be replacing (modifying) genes; not organs!


Anticipating the $100 genome era and the P4™ medicine revolution. P4 Medicine (Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, & Participatory): Catalyzing a Revolution from Reactive to Proactive Medicine.


I am an early adopter of scientific MOOCs. I've earned myself four MIT digital diplomas: 7.00x, 7.28x1, 7.28.x2 and 7QBWx. Instructor of 7.00x: Eric Lander PhD.

Upcoming books: Airpocalypse, a medical thriller (action taking place in Beijing) 2017; Jesus CRISPR Superstar, a sci-fi -- French title: La Passion du CRISPR (2018).

I love Genomics. Would you rather donate your data, or... your vital organs? Imagine all the people sharing their data...

Audio files on this blog are Windows files ; if you have a Mac, you might want to use VLC (http://www.videolan.org) to read them.

Concernant les fichiers son ou audio (audio files) sur ce blog : ce sont des fichiers Windows ; pour les lire sur Mac, il faut les ouvrir avec VLC (http://www.videolan.org).


Trafic d'organes : un journaliste fait évaluer l'ensemble de ses organes par un "courtier" en organes : 300.000 USD

Une personne (ses organes vitaux et ses tissus, transplantables) vaudrait 300.000 USD - ou EUR, le cours des deux monnaies étant, à la louche équivalent ... 300.000 EUR, c'est le prix d'une grosse voiture ... L'humain n'a pas de prix ? Si, il en a un ... et s'il vaut cher, il n'est pas non plus hors de prix ... Bienvenue sur le biomarché ... avec l'homo sapiens au milieu de la chaîne alimentaire, depuis que la médecine de remplacement (les transplantations d'organes) a explosé ... Petit résumé du livre in English ... Je vous présente le "red market" ou "marché rouge", équivalent d'un marché noir des organes ...

"Scott Carney's The Red Market is a book-length investigative journalism piece on the complicated and sometimes stomach-churning underground economy in human flesh, ranging from practice of kidnapping children to sell to orphanages who get healthy kids to pass off to wealthy foreigners to the bizarre criminal rings who imprison kidnapped indigents in 'blood farms' or lure impoverished women into selling their kidneys.

Carney's story starts when he was living and working in India, showing around groups of American students; one of his charges commits suicide and he is plunged into the grisly midst of the bureaucracy of human remains and the disposal thereof. Carney uses this story as a jumping-off point for a series of investigative chapters, each of which is a relatively self-contained look at a different part of the 'red market' -- the black market for human bodies and their parts.

Many of these chapters focus on India, which seems to be at the middle of much of the red market trade, having the unique and unfortunate combination of huge population, massive poverty, widespread corruption, ineffectual bureaucracies, enormous wealth discrepancy, and a post-colonial relationship with the west whose legacy is a set of trade routes and relationships for everything from articulated skeletons (dug up by grave-robbers who terrorize whole villages) to human hair (the sole example of a purely altruistic supply-side in the book -- it's donated by religious pilgrims to help fund a temple) to 'orphans' who are actually poor children, kidnapped by unscrupulous brokers who know that Westerners would rather adopt a healthy, well-looked-after kid than a genuine orphan who's endured privation in an underfunded orphanage.

But Carney also looks at other red markets, grilling cowboy and quack doctors in Cyprus who trade in extreme fertility therapy, preying on vulnerable eastern European women who are coerced into giving up their eggs; recounting his own experiences as a human guinea-pig in pharmaceutical trials in the American midwest; and investigating Falun Gong claims about mass-arrests and organ harvesting from political dissidents in China.

On the way, Carney looks at the wider context of the red markets, the history of graverobbing and medical education, the toothless efforts to contain the trade, and especially the ethical and regulatory frameworks for human tissue and human beings that have been employed and discarded in the past. Carney lays a lot of the blame for the red market in the principle that tissue donors (and birth-parents of adoptive children) should be anonymous. He stipulates that this principle was taken up with the best of intentions, but that the net effect has been to rob the system of transparency, so that middlemen and 'buyers' can disclaim any connection to unethical conduct at the supply side.

Carney also asks some pointed questions about whether market logic can be applied to human tissue, and what it says about the equal sanctity of human life when unequal human wealth puts some of us in a position of selling (or being robbed of) our organs, blood, skin, remains and children so that the rest of us can enjoy a few more years of life, or fertility, or a family.

All of this is raised in order to ask how the real benefits of adoption, blood transfusion, organ transplantation, fertility therapy and so on can go on to be enjoyed without being a less-than-zero-sum game that visits enormous tragedy on the many to improve the lives of the few. Carney examines the claims that synthetic human tissues will come along soon to alleviate the pressure that creates the red markets, and finds it wanting. He notes that each expansion in the supply of human tissues has been attended by an equal growth in demand, created by entrepreneurial surgeons who expand the definition of who might benefit from the use of the tissue.

Carney writes with a novelist's eye for character and detail and a muckraking reporter's gift for asking uncomfortable questions about stuff that most of us shy away from learning too much about. The Red Market is a gripping account of an invisible crime wave that lurks in the wings of every story about miracle medical breakthroughs and dazzling recoveries from the brink of death." (Source)

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