The Science Behind Repo Men's Artificial Organ Market

The Science Behind Repo Men's Artificial Organ Market

In Repo Men, a biomedical engineering firm called The Union sells fully mechanized organs and joints to people who need them. If a mechanical organ recipient can't pay off his organ, it's removed forcibly by stun-gun-wielding repo men. But how close is the film's transplant science and gun technology to real life? We interview experts to find out.

By Jeremy Repanich
Published on: March 19, 2010
Popular Mechanics

While driving around a bleak city of the future, Remy (Jude Law), the protagonist in the film Repo Men, casually explains the nature of his grisly profession. "Can't pay for your house? The bank takes it back. Can't pay for your car? The bank takes it back. You can't pay for your liver? Well, that's where I come in."

Remy, as the title of the film suggests, is a repo man. He works for The Union, a biomedical engineering firm that manufactures, sells and implants mechanized artificial organs. The company claims that its products successfully eased a bulging transplant wait-list, which had swelled to 200,000 people—nearly double the number currently on the list, according to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But there's an insidious catch to this miracle of science: The astronomical price tags on The Union's transplants (which don't appear to be covered by any insurance plan) lead patients to accept $500,000-plus loans from the company, at usurious rates, to pay for a new heart, liver, hip or knee. If the customer falls more than three months behind on payment, enter Remy, his best friend/partner, Jake (Forest Whittaker), and their bounty-hunting colleagues to incapacitate the patient and repossess the organ in a most brutal fashion, by cutting the product out and leaving the person for dead.

Will we see a future with fully man-made artificial organs? Does anything like the repo men's stun gun, which knocks people out cold, exist? Roughly 750,000 Americans undergo knee or hip replacement each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, but will these artificial joints ever be as high-tech as the ones in the film? Popular Mechanics spoke with experts to find out.

Man-Made Artificial Organs
Some of biomedical engineering's leading research happens at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Under the direction of Dr. Alan Russell, the Institute's research includes cell regeneration therapies and artificial organ development.

Russell says the technology presented in Repo Men, where doctors treat failing organs by replacing them with mechanical ones, is unlikely. Instead, a hybrid of the mechanical and the natural is closer to what we'll see in the future. "My sense is that where the science is going is people learning how to fuse cells and material to get people with existing organs to heal themselves, rather than having to replace the whole organ," he says.

Additionally, many artificial organs currently in clinical trials are external units, not implanted ones. For example, the Hemolung (developed by ALung in conjunction with research from McGowan) functions like a kidney dialysis machine. The artificial lung connects to the bloodstream via a vein or artery then routs the blood through "a device which is full of spinning hollow fibers that do the work of adding oxygen and removing carbon dioxide for the blood," Russell says. Artificial livers presently under development function in much the same way. To reclaim these artificial lungs and livers, the repo men would need to do little more than roll them away from the patient.

Though the movie missed the mark on most of the artificial organs, its portrayal of the heart, which The Union implants in Remy after an accident, was a little more scientifically sound. Artificial hearts currently exist as mechanical augmentations to a malfunctioning ticker or as "total hearts that could replace the function of the organ," Russell says. "Until recently artificial hearts were used as a bridge to transplant. Now you get one maybe for the rest of your life."

However, even when Repo Men edges a little bit closer to reality, Russell says it's still miles away from the future of organ treatment. "What they're showing is ludicrous, but entertaining."

Joint Replacement Surgery
Bo Jackson, Vanilla Ice, Hulk Hogan. These men all have one thing in common: artificial hips. In Repo Men, Remy's love interest, Beth (Alice Braga), could count herself among that group, but her fake hip and knee are far more advanced than anything available today.

Beth's high-tech joints totally replace all of the tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bones in her hip and knee. However, according to Dr. Marc Rankin, an orthopedic surgeon in Washington, D.C., who performs about 30 to 40 knee replacements a year, the surgery usually tries to preserve as much of the healthy part of the joint as possible. Rather than replacing human anatomy with a mechanical part, Rankin believes the future will involve "using the person's own stem cells and cartilage to actually form the tissue again," he says. "That's what we're really working on now. To try to get away from using foreign or artificial parts at all."

The Union Standard-Issue Stun Gun
Back in 2007, when we filmed Popular Mechanics contributing editor Erik Sofge enduring a shock from a consumer-grade Taser, we saw the debilitating effects up close. When the Taser shot two probes that carried an electrical current into Sofge's back, he seized up, immediately screamed for it to stop and would have dropped to the floor had people not been holding his arms.

In Repo Men, Remy and his cohorts use stun guns with wireless darts that knock a person unconscious long enough for an impromptu surgery and organ extraction to occur. If the repo men don't kill the person in time, the victims awake a few minutes later, dazed but otherwise unharmed.

The movie gets it partially right in that some day there may be a wireless long-range stun gun, according to Dave Law, the technology division chief for the U.S. military's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. The program, which develops ways to incapacitate enemy combatants while minimizing casualties, has been researching a taser-like human electromuscular incapacitation weapon for nearly five years.

Instead of the few seconds of incapacitation that consumer-grade Tasers offer, like the one we used on Sofge, the military's weapon would deliver either a continuous charge or a series of jolts that would put a person out of action for minutes—"long enough for a war fighter to move in and take control of the situation," Law says. However, this weapon won't knock the person out. "When the charge is being delivered, you're fully conscious, but your muscles are fully tetanized."

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