Organ Banks

The Organ Banks are a department of the Aesculapian Order, overseen by Dr. Roland Stolzfus. They preserve and store donated organs and other tissues, ready for transplant at a moment's notice. Local banks are coordinated from the Montressor Clinic in Basel.

Overview

Working in an Organ Bank is unpleasant, menial work; while many vitakinetics serve short stints in one of the Banks for research purposes, their gifts are rarely wasted there long-term except as punishment. Heinrich Mangels describes the permanent staff of the Basel Organ Bank as "sociopaths and incompetents" who cannot be trusted to work anywhere else. By keeping these members employed, the Order keeps them under its control, and keeps some of its problems and failures out of the public eye.

The Basel Organ Bank is the largest such facility in human space, and pioneered the use of warm nutrient baths instead of cryogenics for storing tissues. The baths produce a smell described as "Cajun blackened jello," which clings to workers long after they leave the premises. The Bank has loading docks with convenient access to highway and air travel, so that donor cadavers can be brought in promptly and organs shipped out rapidly. A dissection lab adjacent to the docks is where the cadavers are processed. Dr. Stolzfus oversees the entire Organ Banks network from Basel, but he is more interested in the politics of his position than the administration or medical aspects, and is frequently absent. In his stead, the Basel bank is managed directly by Dr. Tomas Catalanotto.

Corruption

The Huang-Marr Biorg Project conspirators on Luna used the Beaulac Clinic's Organ Bank to dispose of bodies, including Neutral Lunar residents they had kidnapped to use as raw material for their experimental bioware. Most dead bodies on Luna are recycled, spaced, or turned over to the Organ Banks, but the increase in biomass timed with the rise in unexplained disappearances helped expose the conspiracy.

In 2120 a similar "chop-shop" scheme was uncovered at the Basel Organ Bank, with local organized crime groups dumping bodies there to erase the evidence of their crimes. Doctors processed the bodies without supplying the correct paper trails; not only was the bank overstocked with tissue of unknown origin, but the sloppy documentation almost certainly meant mismatched organs were being distributed to patients in need.

This level of dysfunction is not representative of the Organ Banks as a whole.