Hacker News Reader

Comment by alevskaya | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com