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Comment by mmjaa | Hacker News Reader

This is not going to end well. Human trafficking is already a seriously bad condition in most societies - with this kind of science, I doubt that the black/grey markets are going to ignore the fact that there are very, very wealthy people out there, willing to pay for a little youth or two.

This really speaks to the ethics of science, and technological morality. The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences. If, in ten years time, we see the underbelly of human experience exposed as rows and rows of coppertops, pumping vital energy into the matrix, I won't be at all surprised. I hope my kids don't have to live in that world, though.

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I wouldn't be quite so worried. If the effects truly do end up being due to soluble signalling factors in the younger blood (and not immune cell implantation or some other physiologic quirk of the cross-wired parabiosis experimental setup that won't transfer to non-inbred humans) then those factors will be synthesized in bioreactors and made into a synthetic plasma product - that's also the only likely way to make money on this for a therapeutic company.

That's the only likely way to make money for a legit therapeutic company, but before we have the technology to manufacture young blood cheaply and massively, I think kidnapping people and forcing them to give their blood can be done cheaply and be cost effective for a mafia.

I mean, that's already what they do with sex workers

Why kidnap? Why not just offer $20 per pint and sell it for $200?

Blood banks stopped paying for blood because it attracted the wrong customers, those strapped for cash rather than the idealistic types. As a result quality suffered.

Between hospitals blood is bought and sold at the price you mention.

Radiolab had an episode about this some time ago.

>Blood banks stopped paying for blood because it attracted the wrong customers, those strapped for cash rather than the idealistic types.

I feel like the market can find a solution for this that's unworkable for blood banks because of regulations, hospital requirements, scale, etc.

i.e., force applicants to prescreen their blood and permaban them for lying or if their blood fails drug/illness/etc. checks.

One doubts that kidnapping will yield a higher "quality". The people who may be kidnapped on a regular basis without inviting unwanted attention are a subset of those who would sell their blood.

pay for health check tests before drawing the blood, and if tests results are good pay the person for the blood market price. Otherwise they get nothing. It can really work if you put the incentives in the right place.

Sperm banks manage to get very high quality, sanitary sperm despite many people doing it for the cash. The trick is to have recurrent donors you can test regularly, and to quarantine samples until they can be cleared in bulk.

Here's the episode: [1] It's really one of their better ones. Highly recommended.

[1] - http://www.radiolab.org/story/308403-blood/

Don't plasma centers effectively do this?

And if we are really thinking about catering to the uber rich just raise both prices by an order of magnitude and you'll have plenty of donors and probably a ton of buyers.

I'm going with the sex worker analogy again because I think it works quite well : for a long time in France there were a lot of French prostitutes in the sex market voluntarily, and living decently of it.

But for some years, a lot of prostitutes from Eastern Europe got brought by the mafia and drove the prices way down for everyone. As a result, the market is now filled with exploited girls, working conditions are awful(ler ?), and the libertarian El Dorado of 'young women voluntarily selling a service' is dead, replaced by a dystopia of what has basically become selling drugged meat until the meat is dead or not fresh enough to be sold. The meat comparison is unfortunately not that much of an hyperbole, just go for a jogging in Bois de Boulogne and you'll see true human misery.

I'm afraid the same kind of scenario is not that much of a stretch for blood. It could even be worse, as a prostitute have to at least be presentable so bad treatment has to be a bit restrained.

Rich people may think twice about injecting "shady" blood into their veins though. I mean, many seem fine to do it with intravenous drugs but at least you won't find AIDS-laced heroin.

I think it might make more sense for super rich people to pay people directly to give them their blood, which is morally questionable but maybe not particularly worse than, say, paying for a surrogate mother? It sounds a lot less traumatizing at least, both physically and psychologically. After all many people do donate their blood for free several times a year.

I'm pretty sure you could convince many young people to give up some of their blood for a pretty cheap price actually. No need to resort to kidnapping and slave farms.

I don't think there's any reason one could not lace heroin with AIDS, it just would not reflect well on a dealer. That said, it would likely require intent (or really bizarre circumstances). With blood, it could much more easily happen, you're right.

Many young people already do give up their blood for a pretty cheap price, so I don't think there's any reason for this to become a black market thing.

There's also a black market for stolen organs ? (or did I dream that?)

that is until the market is opened up and regulated. with so many young people around realizing that a thing they constantly produce for free is worth something - there will be no incentive to go through the criminal path. also worth mentioning that this could positively impact young population health as there is now clear monetary incentive to keep your blood healthy.

it's a win all around, regulators just have to be careful and not screw it up.

Blood is worth a lot, people know that already, and illegal blood farming exists in some countries.

But paying for blood increases the risk of people lying about the quality of their blood, which is why the administration doesn't incentivize blood donations.

Your argument about criminality is very wrong. Maybe I speak for myself, but I'd much rather be a criminal than a professional blood donor. People are not criminals because they have no other way...

> risk of people lying about the quality of their blood

this is where middlemen companies come into play, testing the blood and ensuring level of quality

> People are not criminals because they have no other way

sorry, i was not clear enough in my comment. what i meant is that opening up the legal way to sell blood reduces the incentive for criminals to do blood farming or human trafficking for the same purpose. much like legalizing marijuana will push drug traffickers out of the market.

In the US it's already legal to sell plasma, semen, eggs, bone marrow , breast milk, and rent wombs as a surrogate [0]. The legality of selling blood would not eliminate donations much like the ability to sell clothing does not eliminate clothing donation. Considering that there are negatives to selling blood (e.g. time, marginal risk, inconvenience, etc) I think some form of compensation is fair and would only increase the supply

[0] http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/10-body-parts-you-can-le...

>rent wombs as a surrogate

If the tenant stops paying does the baby get delivered prematurely?

Back in college I donated sperm for money. It's not like I was forced into it; it was just nice to have an extra source of income besides my student job.

This also enables sperm banks to retain recurrent donors, which means they can afford to do very rigorous testing amortized over several dozen sperm samples. DNA screening, urine tests, blood tests, etc. That wouldn't be viable under the blood donation model. I've donated blood 5 or 6 times but I doubt even that's enough to make it worth the kind of testing they did on me as a sperm donor.

Western world is already struggling to find enough blood donor, and one of their main source are the students.

You would not want to force those students to have to choose between morality and 1 order of magnitude more money than what they can do in the official public blood donation center.

It is not immoral to sell one's own blood, so long as one is not left unable to fulfill other moral obligations.

The moral bit is choosing between 2 competing blood donations service - one that is run publicly to save life, the other to extend the life of healthy individual. I make the assumption that the remuneration of the second one will be most likely way bigger than in the first case. The only reason people would chose to donate to the first one is morality which is unfair.

The morality of the remuneration is orthogonal. I assumed we were talking about countries where it is moral and legal to remunerate blood donation. I don't think that countries that today do not allow remuneration (for any reason) would allow it for this new use case.

You can still use blood from a private company for the treatments you would use "public" blood for.

i don't buy it. my gut feeling is that loss in number of donors due to incentive to sell will be completely offset by lowering the barrier to giving your blood. companies fighting for customers and public image will start charity programs where some % of sold blood will be donated. there are just many more ways in which blood would be donated into the system with open market than with the closed one.

struggling to find blood because almost nobody wants to give it for free. pay people for their time and donation. thats what markets are for.

> The world simply isn't ready for some of these major advances in human life sciences.

Major advances? Blood transfusions and the whole idea sound quite basic to me.

Yes, blood is rare enough that it's already "farmed". (http://www.medicalbag.com/medicine-abroad/blood-farming-and-...)

If it is sold as a "rejuvenating cosmetics" with scientific evidence backing it up, it will get bad.

Come on. Let's start with a positive comment.

(I think this is one cause of our technological stagnation. Every article about a new technology has a comment like this at the top.)

If only you knew how bad things really are.

What technological stagnation?

> Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.

-- Martin Luther King

Every time someone makes a comment indicating a modicum of social progress, there's a response like yours not getting it. They're not against technology, they're just for things like a decent world to live in, too.

But why not be like Steve Seagal in that MAD TV sketch instead? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_l-4rAUAzQ&t=1m32s That's our response to Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Konrad Zuse, Joseph Weizenbaum and many others. Just wait until they die, then lie to ourselves that we aren't stuck at a set of stairs they climbed, but that this slide into the basement is an elevator that goes up and is much more efficient than the stairs.

Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point? Maybe they did but kept it to themselves, or they wrote a lot about it and I just missed it. Anecdotally at least it seems that the people who would want immortality are those it would be wasted on, while those that are hard to let go would not accept it. We're like cancer to the tapestry of life, we don't see the beauty of the life around us, we just want to have MOAR of our own. The more mediocre the person the more likely for that to be true. We can do without honey bees, fuck yeah, but we can't do without prolonging the lives of people who didn't grok it in the time they had. Let's loop the broken sounds of all things, maybe in a loop they will be less broken.

If you want a positive comment, make a positive situation, and I'll cheerlead gladly.

Doesn't contribute? Who are you kidding? At least answer which technological stagnation you were referring to. You make the claim, follow it up, but don't blame me for paying the attention you so sorely lack.

"Ever noticed how the greats don't seem to obsess much about having to die at some point?"

This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]

Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death

[2] - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-ni...

Was Marcus Aurelius a saint? Was Einstein?

> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.

In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?

Negative comments being quickly bubbled up to the top is an HN thing. Most tech folks I know are the idealist type.

Sure, lets just start with the positive vibes, overlook the potential ramifications for the creation of a real vampire-class of humanity, and just enjoy the fact that the old can exploit the young and become strong again.

I mean, whats wrong with that, really?

Here's the thing .. we live in a dangerous world precisely because technologists decided to ignore the social ramifications of their work and only focus on 'the positive' that comes from it.

I mean, the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese did a lot of positive things for human sciences .. can't we just enjoy the fact that their research into the limits of human endurance has made it possible to be a better military pilot? C'mon people ..

The truth about Human Trafficking will rock the world. The truth will come out soon.

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