ORGAN CLAIM OUTER

Morning Falun Gong exercises, in Guangzhou.

EYES FLASHING, operatic scorn, a middle-aged woman holding a placard reading : ''Evil Cult Falun Gong!'' ordered me off-

The sidewalk outside Hong Kong's conventional center where - Organ transplant specialists from around the world were gathered

''Go away!'' she shouted ''You're no good!''

My crime?

After interviewing her as she stood with a group called Anti-Cult Association, she had spotted me interviewing a woman at a competing demonstration of practitioners of Falun Gong-

A Meditation and exercise-based spiritual practice that the Chinese government outlawed as a cult in 1999, jailing many practitioners.

The Anti-Cult Association says it is a civil-society organization, but its aims closely reflect the  Chinese government's.

Falun Gong adherents say that after the movement was banned, many were blood-typed in detention, and thousands became a secret-source of organs for human transplants.

The Chinese government and the Anti-Cult Association, which, according to its website, promotes ''Confucian thinking and science,'' deny this.

The searing debate over forced organs extraction is not new. For about 15 years it has raged, between the Chinese government and its supporters and Falun Gong practitioners and investigators.

But as hundreds of the world's leading  transplant surgeons, including from China, gathered at the  Transplantation Society's biennial meeting in Hong Kong some weeks ago -

The issue seemed more explosive than ever - perhaps because the meeting was on Chinese soil for the first time, bringing the debate closer to home.

The World Students Society thanks Didi Kirsten Tatlow.