Published: Feb. 12, 2008

University of California, Berkeley Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes will give two free public lectures at the University of Colorado at Boulder Feb. 22 and Feb. 23 on the increasing trend of illicit trafficking of human organs around the world.

Scheper-Hughes, the Chancellor's Professor of Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and co-founder and director of the international group, Organs Watch, will speak at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 23, in Hale Science Building room 270. Titled "Into the Gray Zone: Trafficking the Organ Traffickers," the talk will focus on international criminal networks that link patients in need of transplants with surgeons, hospitals, laboratories, governments and desperate Third World peasants in need of money.

An earlier public talk by Scheper-Hughes on Friday, Feb. 22, at 4 p.m. in Hale Science Building room 230 will target the disappearance of more than 1,400 patients and the deaths of more than 1,300 between 1976 and 1991 from Argentina's national mental asylum, Colonia Montes de Oca, near Buenos Aires. She will discuss allegations of institutional abuses there, including blood, organ and tissue trafficking, and medical experimentation and drug trials allegedly related to the disappearances and deaths of some of the patients.

Hale Science Building is located just southeast of the intersection of Broadway and University Avenue and parking is available along University Avenue and in the Euclid Avenue Autopark just east of the University Memorial Center. Scheper-Hughes also serves on the World Health Organization advisory panel on global transplant safety and ethics and is a member of the Asian Task Force on Combating Traffic in Humans for Organs.

For information call 303-492-2547.