Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of Organs Watch, a Berkeley-based academic research project that documents allegations of illegal organ trafficking.

Last week, Scheper-Hughes spoke at the first international UN forum on Trafficking in Humans, where she called attention to the sale and theft of human organs for transplant surgery and the role of transplant surgeons in collaborating with criminal organ trafficking networks.

The number of people trafficked for organs is unknown, however Scheper-Hughes indicates that well over 15,000 kidneys are trafficked each year. Her organization has documented allegations of the illegal organ trade in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Israel, India and the United States. Although some people have argued that organ trafficking saves lives, Scheper-Hughes points to the gross inequities of the trade.

“It reproduces all of the racial, ethnic, gender inequities in the world,” Scheper-Hughes said in a Toronto Sun article. “It always involves the exploitation of very poor and very desperate people who don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I think I’m going to sell a kidney,’ unless someone is there and telling them, ‘I’ve got a way to solve your problems.”      

The UN forum on Trafficking in Humans was also covered by the Associated Press on February 14 and reprinted in the International Herald Tribune and the USA Today. To read the article, click here.   

Nancy Sheper-Hughes is the author of the book “The Ends of the Body: The Global Traffic in Organs,” to be published by the University of California Press in 2008. Excerpts of her book were published in the March, April and May 2007 issues of Anthropology News under the title "Postcard From Brazil."

To read more Members in the News entries, click here.