【明報專訊】Last time I wrote about the virtuous trend of organ donation, the promotion of which is increasingly making a positive difference in medical care. However, related to this popular rise of interest in organ donation (despite lingering objections and misconceptions) is the problem of organ harvesting. The biotechnology / pharmaceutical industries and university research laboratories are the two primary sources in our society that need body organs. Together, they collect our bodies, especially body parts, in the name of technological innovation and therapeutic care. For the university laboratory, where innovation is said to meet altruism, and where science intersects with the commitment to save lives, the human body is valued as the object of experimentation for the social good. In this way, the university sometimes becomes both the community donation station of fresh body parts and the facilitator of a multi-billion dollar biomedical industry. Anatomy classes routinely rely on families and private groups to donate cadavers. But universities also spend large sums of money to buy corpses and various body parts. "From whom?" one may ask. Well, from prisons, from government's coroner's office, and sometimes even from funeral homes. In some countries, there have also been cases of private laboratories purchasing illegal corpses from underground markets and international organ traffickers who smuggle dead bodies and spare body parts from far-flung developing countries.