Journalist Scott Carney’s recent book, The Red Market, chronicles the various ways – from South Asian blood farms to ancient temples where devotees’ hair is sold for wigs – in which the world is steadily commodifying the human body. According to Carney, recent advances in medicine have made the market for body parts all the more lucrative.
THE MARK: How did you come to write The Red Market?
SCOTT CARNEY: I started out as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I had finished all the course work for my PhD and was just about to head abroad to do my field work. But I had a problem, in that I didn't get the grants that I needed to actually do my research, so I was sort of looking at this nebulous future. During the summer, a friend of mine said, “Scott, you need some money. Why don't you go join a clinical trial?” People can make a lot of money really quickly by renting their bodies to pharmaceutical companies, and I thought that was a great idea.
So I signed up for this clinical trial. I just called the company, and it turned out it was testing a new drug that was basically a reformulation of Viagra. So I was going to be locked in a room with 30 guys who were hopped up on these erectile-dysfunction drugs. One, I thought it was hilarious to have that done, and two, I was interested in the way that our bodies were being commodified – I was already thinking in anthropological ways.
So I went there, and I met all these people who were professional guinea pigs, literally going from clinical trial to clinical trial around the country, and making about $60,000 a year doing this. And it was just sort of weird to be in that situation. I made my money from that trial – about $2,500 – but I also wrote about the experience in the weekly paper there, and for a website called Nerve.com. I realized I could make money writing, which was sort of groovy, and also that there's this whole underground industry that seems a little bit like prostitution. It’s potentially dangerous, because you're testing these chemicals that may or may not be great for you.
I'd been studying in India for years – I'd been going there since about 1998 – and, after some background research, I found out that this clinical-trial business was really big in India, as well. In fact, clinical trials were being outsourced there. I travelled to India, and I began writing for Wired magazine. I eventually got more and more involved in different aspects of this “body business” – probably because of that first experience [in the clinical trial].
There's a second nail in the coffin to my academic career, which I write about in the book. When I went to India, I went as a program director for an abroad program, and one of my students died on the trip, and I was responsible for bringing her body back to the United States. After she died, all these people came out of the woodwork with interest in her body. There were morticians involved, there were insurance companies trying to move her body back to the U.S., there was her family, and there was the police, who initially suspected murder. And it struck me that, as a person, when she was alive, she had a certain control over her body that she relinquished in death. I started thinking about what it means to have the body as an object, first as something that has a soul or some ineffable value in it.
THE MARK: How did your research bring you to the attention of what you call the “Red Market”?
CARNEY: I continued to be interested in this idea of the physical self versus the commercial self, and the interplay between those two. I was living in South India with my wife, when, in the village next to where we lived, everyone sold their kidneys all at once. I was sort of in the middle of it all, and I broke the story for the international media. Everywhere I looked, I felt like more stories about the body being commercialized were happening around me – there were these kidney sales, there were the blood farmers … I even tracked groups of grave robbers around. And I just sort of followed it – it sort of happened incidentally. I would finish one story and look up and another would just land in my lap.
THE MARK: And your book draws on all of this.
CARNEY: Yeah. I looked at children who were kidnapped and sold into adoption. I looked at bones that were robbed from graves and sold as medical skeletons to the western world – actually, through a Canadian bone broker. I looked at surrogacy clinics where women rented and sold their wombs. I looked at human egg selling in Cyprus, Spain. And I looked at many other things. It's really a very wide book in terms of content; I'm looking at these broader concepts of the commercialization of flesh.
THE MARK: What did you find that shocked you the most?
CARNEY: It's still shocking to me that the body can be sold – that we can look at the body only for its parts, and not for being a human. I don't think I've ever really gotten over that concept. But as for particular events, there was this one moment in India where literally 80 women all lined up and showed me their abdomens, and they all had kidney-extraction scars. That was shocking. I was also shocked talking to police and doctors who had received people who had literally been kidnapped for their blood. It's all of these things.
Photo courtesy of Reuters.
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