When a team of reporters began work in October 1999 on the story that became "The Body Brokers," we started with a vague idea: People were buying and selling body parts donated at death. CAR played an important role in uncovering the dimensions and practices of the $500 million body parts industry.
Among the findings of the five-part series: Nonprofit tissue banks work hand-in-glove with for-profit processors, often through exclusive contracts; the pressure to get more bodies is so strong that tissue bank employees and researchers occasionally take body parts without asking; and although the Food and Drug Administration and the industry claim a near-perfect safety record for tissue products, they aren't looking very hard.
Although we explored many issues in our story - legal, political, even moral and religious issues - The Body Brokers was at heart a business story. Like any business, tissue banks and processors had to find raw material, win financial backing, develop technology, deal with pesky bureaucrats and market their products. Those universal business needs created paper and online trails.
Nonprofits
We were dealing with the intersection of nonprofit groups and for-profit, often public corporations. As a result, we often could get information from corporate documents that was unavailable from the nonprofits, and vice-versa. For example, we learned early in our investigation that the American Red Cross was among the nation's largest tissue suppliers. We knew it had a relationship with Osteotech, a New Jersey-based public company. The Red Cross wouldn't give us a copy of its contract with Osteotech. But Osteotech had included the contract in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It took just a few minutes to find the contract on EDGAR, the SEC's irreplaceable online database of corporate documents (www.sec.gov).
(A hint for those seeking obscure corporate documents: Read the footnotes at the end of a company's 10-K or 10-Q. These will list not only documents attached to the current filing but citations to documents that were filed years ago, including the name and date of the relevant filing. A recent Osteotech filing pointed us to a 2- or 3-year-old filing that contained the American Red Cross contract.)
When we began our research, Guidestar (www.guidestar.org) - a wonderful source for reporters on the nonprofit beat - had just begun posting Form 990's for hundreds of thousands of nonprofits. We had to get our 990s the old fashioned way, through a massive request to the Internal Revenue Service.
CAR played an important role in uncovering the dimensions and practices of the $500 million body parts industry.
Once we got sufficient 990s and 10-K's, we assembled them into a series of spreadsheets. Although this information was a year to 18 months out of date, it gave us an excellent idea of the industries' finances and of the nonprofit/for-profit relationships that made everything work. This put us in a strong position when we interviewed industry executives; we knew too much to be given the standard industry spin on the "gift of life."
Federal regulation
The Food and Drug Administration was an indifferent regulator of the industry. But its Web site (www.fda.gov) still provided many valuable clues. I strongly recommend the agency's weekly online bulletin, which lists every FDA-sanctioned recall. Its online list of warning letters also is valuable. After discovering that a simple search on "human tissue" or "bone" missed many relevant recalls, I settled down to spend a day and a half reading every FDA bulletin from the beginning of 1994 (shortly after FDA began regulating tissue banks) through the end of 1999. This provided the starting point for our story on FDA's half-hearted enforcement.