Forbidden Harvest

FORBIDDEN HARVEST dramatizes the ethical and moral issues related to organ transplants and reveals what goes on behind the scenes, from the hospital to the courtroom. (A book trailer is available at vimeo.com/72120149)When does a hero become a villain? In this new medical thriller, Dr. Ken Bernholtz, distinguished pathologist at Children’s Memorial, is deep into preservation of organs for transplant. He has perfected a method of extending the life of a harvested animal heart from six hours to twenty-four hours. If his method is successful using human organs, it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of children. But when he attempts to replicate his animal experiments using human organs, the hospital, amid a major building campaign, and under pressure from outside protestors, rejects his proposal. Dr. Bernholtz is incredulous, and his frustration leads him to risk his career and reputation by taking the law into his own hands. He removes cadaver organs at autopsy without hospital or parental permission. He uses some to continue his research, and others he sends to a nearby hospital where Saudi children await donor organs. Only the hospital medical director, Dr. Gamal Faysal, knows that some of the organs used in his hospital are illegally obtained. Unknown to Dr Bernholtz, Dr. Faysal is extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the parents of the children who receive transplants at his hospital. Bernholtz’s clandestine activities become complicated when his godson, Link, at thirteen, needs a new heart to survive. Other characters include Link’s dad and his stunning grandmother, Lydia, as well as the boy’s hospital friend Marty, a teenage cancer patient with a smart mouth and wild ideas. Marty tells her young doctor that she hid in the morgue and saw Dr. Bernholtz remove organs that he didn't have permission to harvest. With a bit of sleuthing, he determines Marty is indeed correct. He confronts Dr. Bernholtz, who pleads with him not to expose him until he can procure a heart for Link. The novel ends in a dramatic courtroom confrontation where Dr. Bernholtz is charged with criminal trafficking in human organs.

“When the sources of a strained medical system reach critically low levels, one doctor bypasses ethical concerns to act—creating a sophisticated network that saves lives but which also threatens to destroy his career. When doctors inform Tom Bradshaw that his 12-year-old son, Link, is having a heart attack, he turns incredulous. But the relative stability Link experiences after his initial episode is soon offset by a flurry of negative test results, each of which seems to illuminate more parts of an increasingly threatening outlook. Born with a congenital heart defect, Link is in need of that most precarious of operations: a heart transplant. He finds himself navigating not only hospitals, complex prognoses and more tests, but the lingering grief he feels for his mother, who perished in an auto accident a year prior. Still, he manages to make friends with Marty, a cancer patient, who launches a spying operation that unwittingly discovers the dilemma on which the novel hinges: Dr. Kenneth Bernholtz, a family friend of the Bradshaws’, has been pilfering organs from dead patients in an exasperated attempt to perfect a technology that preserves harvested organs longer than usual. Several races against time ensue as Link’s family struggles to procure him a working heart, Marty tries to determine her fate amid rounds of chemo treatment, and Dr. Bernholtz endeavors to forestall the collapse of his covert operation...

...The novel’s climax, which pivots on the tension between patients’ rights and the medical community’s task of saving lives, highlights the profound moral ambiguity and emotional tumult of this still highly relevant issue...

...A compelling medical drama, written in taut prose, that addresses with tact, humor, poignancy and sophistication the question of what individuals in desperate circumstances owe to each other.”