During the mid-2000s, Scott Carney was living in southern India and teaching American anthropology students on their semester abroad when one of his charges died, apparently a suicide. For two days, he watched over her body while the provincial police investigated her death, reporters bribed their way into the morgue to photograph the newsworthy corpse, local doctors performed an autopsy, and ice had to be rounded up to retard decomposition. Finally, his boss asked Carney to take pictures of the girl’s mangled remains for analysis by forensic experts back in the States.

This unsettling experience gave Carney his first inkling of how a human being becomes a thing. When he abandoned academia for investigative journalism (he writes for Wired, Mother Jones and other publications), his South Asian surroundings offered him many examples of the ways human bodies — in part or in whole — are transformed into commodities. He calls this the ‘red market,’ a term that encompasses the trade (legal and illegal) in human bones, blood, organs, embryos, surrogate pregnancy and living children.

‘The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers’ is the alarming product of Carney’s research. It includes vivid, […]