There was an interesting scene this early morning in front of the Hynes Convention Center on Boylston Street. More than a dozen people in yellow shirts, part of the Chinese Falun Gong, were standing quietly on the sidewalk, facing the doors and holding up 5 long banners. They were there for the World Transplant Congress, a major meeting for transplant surgeons and researchers that began earlier this week. The protesters’ message was that there is a transplant “boom” in China and it is being fueled by organs harvested from imprisoned Falun Gong members.

At first, before I got a good look at the banners, I thought maybe some Chinese officials were in town and that’s why the Falun Gong members were protesting. It wasn’t until I sat through my first session, about hand transplants, that I really made the connection.

Marco Lanzetta of the University of Milan in Italy talked about the results of the 23 hand transplants that have been performed around the world since 1998, based on the data in the International Registry on Hand and Composite Tissue Transplantation.

Lanzetta said that he was getting conflicting reports from surgeons in China performing hand transplants: some said many of their patients had failed transplants (ie lots of rejection by the immune system or other serious complications) and others said the patients were fine. The picture was so muddy that Lanzetta said he was making a trip to China to find out for himself what was going on.

I got the impression that there wasn’t much trust in the room in the Chinese surgeons, since they apparently weren’t sharing a lot of their data with their western counterparts. One surgeon in the audience suggested that the data from the Chinese surgeries (whatever they could get) shouldn’t even be counted.

With the question hanging in the air of where the transplants even came from and the protesters outside, I left the conference this morning thinking that Chinese research has a long way to go to catch up with the standards of the west.