On the same night that Dr. Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat) is presented with a prestigious mathematics award, FBI Special Agents Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) and David Sinclair (Alimi Ballard) respond to a disturbance call from a hotel and find a young Indian woman (Noureen DeWulf) cowering in a blood-stained basement.
The woman then tells Amita that her name is Santi and that she and her sister, Prita (Azita Ghanizada), came to the United States from Chennai, India, as organ tourists, selling their kidneys on the black market to earn money for their families.
Dr. Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) and Dr. Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) determine the time of another victim's death as earlier in the day.
Brown) and from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), FBI Special Agent Megan Reeves (Diane Farr) goes to the hospital to see if Santi's sister is there.
She learns that a young Indian woman had been in the morgue for a couple of days, dead from complications involving the removal of one of her kidneys.
Amita decides to use her money from her prize to finance the sisters' education and to take a trip to India with her grandmother, since the case has inspired her to learn about her heritage.
During the case, Don learns that his and Charlie's father Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch) had a friend who needed a transplant and could not find a match.
An article in the Christian Science Monitor inspired Numb3rs series writer J. David Harden to write an episode about organ tourists.
[3] Harden also incorporated Dorry Segev and Summer Gentry’s algorithm for matching transplant donors and recipients.
[7] In an article highlighting the rise of realistic Indian-American characters on American television, Anil Padmanabhan, a writer for India Today, called the episode Rawat's "best exposure".
Although he found the message about organ donations "positive", Kevin B. O'Reilly of the American Medical Association's MedNews called "Harvest" "a mixed bag".