“Great timing,” Rankin was saying. “This tissue-bank convention’s the perfect opportunity to make contact with Sinclair.”
Raymond Sinclair was the founder and CEO of Tissue Sciences and Services, the New Jersey tissue bank that the FBI believed had obtained dozens of bodies from the MacArthur School of Medicine. “And you’re sure he’ll be here?”
“Well, I’m sure he flew from Newark to Las Vegas yesterday, and I’m sure he’s scheduled to give a talk tomorrow morning. ‘Enrolling Donors: Thinking Outside the Box.’ I guess he means thinking outside the pine box.” Rankin snorted. “You think the irony in the title was intentional?”
“Ask me after I hear his talk. What time and where?”
“Ten A.M., Nottingham Room.”
“Nottingham? As in ‘Sheriff of,’ from Robin Hood? I thought the hotel was all about King Arthur. The hotel’s called the Excalibur, right?”
“King Arthur, Robin Hood, same difference,” he said. “Merrie Olde England. You were expecting rigorous historical accuracy at a casino hotel with red and blue plastic turrets at each corner?” He had a point there.
As Rankin went over the plan for tomorrow once more, the taxi left the airport and turned onto Sunset, then made a right onto Las Vegas Boulevard. To the left rose the three-winged tower of Mandalay Bay, its dark glass façade split by vertical shafts of golden light. Up ahead glittered a compressed version of New York City’s skyline, where a roller coaster corkscrewed past a replica of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Farther up the Strip, the Eiffel Tower blazed with light; it was only half the size of the real one, in Paris, but I had to admit, even a half-size Eiffel Tower was impressive. Although I wasn’t fond of the noise or the crowds — or the traffic or the gambling or the drinking, for that matter — as an anthropologist I found Las Vegas fascinating. Plunked down in the middle of a hot, barren basin — Vegas averaged just four inches of rain a year, less than one-tenth Knoxville’s amount — the city had no logical reason to exist, or at least no logical reason to exist where it did. Yet somehow, in the sands of the desert, it had carved out a unique, neon-lit niche for itself in the life and lore of the nation.
The taxi slowed as it passed the tawny sphinx guarding the Luxor, a black-glass pyramid of a hotel. From the pyramid’s tip, a column of blue-white light soared into the sky: a searchlight that sought nothing, an eye staring blindly, blindingly upward. Years before, on a trip to the Middle East, I’d traveled to Luxor, the Great Pyramids, and the Valley of the Kings; seeing the comic-book replicas, I found myself appalled and amused in equal measure.
Just beyond the Luxor, the cab turned in at the Excalibur, its castle turrets topped with crayon-colored cones. I bid Rankin good night, paid the taxi driver, and stepped into the hotel’s dark, mazy lobby, with its relentless ching-ching-ching of electronic slot machines. I checked in, rode the elevator up the vast tower of featureless rooms, and tumbled into bed to rest up for tomorrow morning’s gambling, when — if luck was with me — I’d be betting with chips of flesh and bone from the Body Farm.
“Enrolling donors: thinking outside the Box” was a more interesting talk than the clunky title had led me to expect. Raymond Sinclair — and the talk he gave — reminded me of Las Vegas: loud, flashy, and repellent, yet also equally fascinating. He began with a rapid-fire review of the history and growth of allograft transplants, transplants from dead bodies to living patients. First attempted a century and a half ago — a French surgeon transplanted skin from a fresh cadaver to a patient — allograft transplants had remained rare for decades but had soared during the second half of the twentieth century. By 2008 the number had risen to 1.5 million a year, and it was still rising fast. Surgeries that had once been risky experimental procedures — transplanting corneas and rebuilding knees with cadaver cartilage, for instance — were now routine; meanwhile, new transplant surgeries were being developed all the time.
“So when the number of tissue transplants reaches two million a year,” Sinclair said, “or five million a year, or ten million a year — and trust me, that’ll happen in the blink of a laser-corrected eye — where will we get all those corneas and tendons and ligaments?” He paused to let the hundred people in the room consider the problem. “I’ll tell you,” he went on. “The government in Washington is gonna merge the IRS and the FDA to create a new federal agency that combines revenue collection with medical oversight. And if you think you pay an arm and a leg in taxes now…”
He left it unfinished, and as the joke slowly sank in, a few people laughed, and a chubby guy in the second row groaned.
“Hey, buddy, don’t piss me off,” Sinclair warned, “or I’ll tell my amputation jokes, and those are really, really lame.”
This time half the audience groaned, but the other half — and Sinclair himself — laughed at the outrageous political incorrectness. The bleary-eyed, jet-lagged crowd was warming to Vegas Ray.
And then he turned on a dime. “Seriously, folks, how do we, as tissue banks, keep pace with the rising demand? The organ-procurement network has made huge progress on that front, by a very simple mechanism. Millions of people in the United States every year are now routinely asked the question ‘Do you wish to be an organ donor?’ when they renew their driver’s license. The number of people who’ve said yes to that question — the number who opt in — is incredible: eighty million. Eighty million people have said, ‘Yes, I do.’ If you’ve got a spouse or a son or a daughter wait-listed for a kidney, the suspense is pure hell. Still, at this moment hundreds of millions of human organs are flowing, at whatever speed fate decrees, toward the mouth of the donor pipeline. Isn’t that amazing?”
He looked around the room, and heads nodded, including mine.
“But. But,” he went on, “even with all the public support for organ donation, it’s not enough. Thousands of people on the organ waiting list die every year for lack of a matching transplant. And whole-body donation faces far bigger challenges. People are good at denying the finality of death if they’re signing over just a few parts. But the clerks at the DMV don’t ask about whole-body donation, and — somebody correct me if I’m wrong — Hollywood isn’t rushing to make blockbuster movies about cadaver tendon or bone paste.”
Damn skippy, I heard myself thinking. It was an expression I’d picked up from Miranda, which I understood to mean “Amen, brother,” or “You got that right.”
“There are two things we absolutely must do,” he went on, “if we’re to have any hope of enlisting enough whole-body donors to meet the growing need for tissue. First, we have got to do a better job of storytelling. People connect with human stories — stories of wrenching need, stories of inspiring generosity. If all we say is, ‘Give the gift of life,’ we’re doing a piss-poor job of educating the public about the importance of whole-body donation. It’s crucial that we tell the stories of real-life people — flesh-and-blood people — whose broken lives could be mended with tissue from whole-body donation.” He raised his arms and spread them wide, a gesture that reminded me of paintings of Jesus. “We are modern-day miracle workers, folks: healing the sick, helping the lame walk, and making the blind see. And we have a duty, to donors and recipients alike, to share those stories proudly with the world.” His fervor surprised me, and so did the enthusiastic applause it inspired.