"But there are more attacks now," Sanger said. "Because of all the pollution..."
"No, se?or. There is no change. Every month, the jaguars take two to four turtles. We have records going back many years."
"The violence we see here isnot normal."
A short distance away, the jaguar was still eating the mother. Bones still crunching.
"But itis normal," Ramon Valdez said. "It is the way things are."
Sanger did not want to talk about it anymore. Clearly, Valdez was an apologist for the industrialists and polluters, the big American companies that dominated Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. Not surprising to find such a person here, since the CIA had controlled Costa Rica for decades. This wasn't a country; it was a subsidiary of American business interests. And American businesses did not give a damn for the environment.
Ramon Valdez said, "The jaguars must eat, too. I think better a turtle than to take a human baby."
That, Mark Sanger thought, was a matter of opinion.
Back at homein Berkeley, Sanger sat in his loft and pondered what to do. Although Sanger told people he was a biologist, he had no formal training in the field. He had attended one year of college before dropping out to work briefly for a landscape architecture firm, Cather and Holly; the only biology he had taken was a course in high school. The son of a banker, Sanger possessed a substantial trust fund and did not need to work to support himself. He did, however, need a purpose in life. Wealth, in his experience, made the quest for self-identity even more difficult. And the older he got, the harder it was to think about going back and finishing college.
Recently, he had started to define himself as an artist, and artists did not need formal training. In fact, formal education interfered with the artist's ability to feel the zeitgeist, to ride the waves of change rolling through society, and to formulate a response to them. Sanger was very well informed in his opinion. He read the Berkeley papers, and sometimes magazines likeMother Jones, and several of the environmental magazines. Not every month, but sometimes. True, he often just looked at the pictures, skimming the stories. But that was all that was necessary to track the zeitgeist.
Art was aboutfeeling. About how itfelt to live in this materialistic world, with its gaudy luxuries, false promises, and profound disappointments. What was wrong with people today was that they ignored their feelings.
It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. That was why so many young artists were using genetic techniques and living material to create art. Wet art, they called it. Tissue art. Many artists now worked full-time in science labs, and the art that resulted was distinctly scientific. One artist had grown steaks in a Petri dish, and then ate them in public, as a performance. (Supposedly they tasted awful. Anyway, they were genetically modified. Ugh.) An artist in France had made a glowing bunny rabbit by inserting luminescent genes from a firefly or something. And still other artists had changed the hair color of animals, giving them rainbow hues, and had grown porcupine quills on the head of a cute puppy.
These works of art provoked strong feelings. Many people were disgusted. But, then, Sanger thought, they should be disgusted. They should feel the same revulsion that he himself had felt watching the slaughter of a mother turtle by a jaguar on a beach in Costa Rica. That horrid perversion of nature, that repellent savagery that he could not put out of his mind.
And that, of course, was the reason to make art.
Not art for art's sake. Rather, art to benefit the world, art to help the environment. That was Mark Sanger's goal, and he set about to attain it.
LOCAL DOCTOR ARRESTED FOR ORGAN THEFT
Long Beach Memorial Hospital Staffer Implicated; Thieves Sold Bones, Blood, Organs
Aprominent Long Beach physician has been arrested for selling organs illegally removed from dead bodies at Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Dr. Martin Roberts, chief administrator of the pathology laboratory, which conducts autopsies at the hospital, was charged on 143 counts of illegally harvesting body parts from cadavers, and selling the contraband to tissue banks.
Said Long Beach District Attorney Barbara Bates, "This indictment reads like a B-movie horror story." Bates also alleged in her indictment that Dr. Roberts forged death certificates, falsified lab results, and colluded with local funeral homes and cemeteries to conceal his reign of error.
The case is only the most recent episode in a nationwide pandemic of modern-day bodysnatching. Other cases include "Dr. Mike" Mastromarino, a millionaire Brooklyn, N.Y., dentist who, over a five-year period, purportedly stole organs from thousands of cadavers, including bones from the 95-year-old Alastair Cooke; a Fort Lee, N.J., biomedical firm that sold Mastromarino's body parts to tissue banks across the United States; a crematorium in San Diego alleged to have stolen body parts from the cadavers entrusted to it; another in Lake Elsinore, California, where body parts were kept in huge freezers prior to sale; and UCLA Medical Center, where 500 bodies were cut up and sold for $700,000, some to the firm of Johnson & Johnson.
"The problem is worldwide," said DA Bates. "Tissue theft has been reported in England, Canada, Australia, Russia, Germany, and France. We believe such thefts now occur everywhere in the world," Bates added. "Patients are very concerned."
Dr. Roberts pleaded innocent to all charges in Superior Court and was released on a $1 million bond. Also indicted were four other Long Beach Memorial Hospital staffers, including Marilee Hunter, the head of the hospital genetics lab.
Long Beach Memorial administrator Kevin McCormick expressed shock at the indictments, and said that "Dr. Roberts's behavior contravenes everything that our institution stands for." He said he had ordered a thorough review of hospital procedures and would make the report public when it was completed.