How Not to Lose Three-Quarter Pounds of Kidney to Spoilage On the Organ Trail

It's no surprise that those in need of an organ transplant are willing to pay an arm and a leg for someone else's precious innards. The Havocscope black market index figures annual global organ trafficking at $75 million – a drop in the roughly $10 trillion underground bucket, sure, but counterfeit purses, lighters and batteries all have nothing on transplant tourism.

Kidneys have cornered this market, in a sense, in that they can be harvested from living, breathing donors, not like hearts, lungs or intestines. A quarter of all kidneys appear to be trafficked, Art Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, tells the Associated Press. By the World Health Organization's estimate, the average black market kidney goes for around $5,000.

The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 forbids anyone from knowingly buying or slinging organs for transplant, an illegal practice “just about everywhere else in the world, too.” So in a precedent for U.S. law, a Brooklyn fellow plead guilty on Thursday to brokering three Israeli kidneys to desperate Americans to the tune of $120,000 per organ – this after buying the things for $10,000 a pop off of “vulnerable people,” according to prosecutors. Busted by two wired FBI agents, the man admits on undercover tape to being "what you call a matchmaker," and that, "One of the reasons it's so expensive is because you have to shmear (pay others) all the time."

While the defense insists that the clients sought him out and understood the risks and that all went under the knife of seasoned surgeons and transplant experts "in prestigious American hospitals," just how, exactly, are kidneys in limbo – or any other transplantable organs – preserved? Is it all as easy as setting the goods on the rocks and keeping the cooler top shut tight? And what sort of shelf life are we talking about? Minutes? Hours? Days?

In some cases, yes, it can be that easy. Tradionally, ex vivo kidney preservation has gone the way of static cold storage, whereby the organ chills with a preservative solution in an icebox.

Is this route advisable? Maybe not. A 2009 study by researchers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany randomly assigned one kidney from each of 336 donor pairs to either preservation machines or "cold storage." Kidneys were then stitched into 672 patients, who were monitored for a year.

The scientists' findings, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggested that machine preservation via the LifePort Kidney Transporter "significantly reduced the risk of delayed organ function," according to the Daily Mail.

LifePort units are pretty slick, if $20,000 price tags are your thing. By injecting kidneys with a cold liquid solution, transporters can nearly double an organ's ex vivo life span between homes, so to speak. With a user-friendly interface (only critical organ-monitoring data will bombard the carrier in transit), well over 100 regional medical centers worldwide (and two-thirds of the legal U.S. market) are sporting LifePorts. Wouldn't be at all surprised if the Brooklyn "matchmaker" had one of these babies to shuttle around his wares.

Or, maybe he took a page from the book on high-end culinary delicacies. Earlier this year, a research group at Hiroshima University proved it possible to safely freeze whole teeth and their delicate, attendant tissues. Keep the freezer frozen, their thinking goes, and teeth can be preserved for four decades.

OK, OK, so maybe this method would've have been impossible for the bloody Brooklyn broker. But maybe not for long: The Hiroshima group believes the culinary supercooling technique known as Cells Alive System, or CAS, could potentially be employed to store internal organs. CAS, in brief, uses magnetic fields to jitter water enough to prevent its freezing, even at temps down to -10 degrees Celcius. And once the fields are shut off, water present in the food freezes instantly. Ridding any chance of ice growth, then, CAS would prevent organ freezer burn.

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Reach this organ-donating writer at brian@motherboard.tv.