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Comment by jdrc | Hacker News Reader

That was decades ago though. AFAIK nowadays all countries operate large banks - the UK has a big one. It s likely that a donor CAN be found through such banks. Besides, this kind of commercial approach is not systematic and doesnt guarantee diversity of samples in any way -- in fact people from economically disadvantaged genetic backgrounds will have less access to it. Diversity is somethign that public bases do take into account.

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Why do you think they'd have less access? They have greater access because they will 100% find a donor - themselves. It guarantees access to a sample regardless of genetic background

As I understand it many of the common potential use cases only work if you have a donor who isn’t yourself. Because if you have a genetic disease that disease will be present in your stem cells. The most common example I’ve heard is of storing stem cells to help a potential future sibling, not the baby directly. Or am I mistaken?

It has been used for the baby themselves & siblings :)

Some cases where babies use them themselves: https://www.nature.com/articles/bmt2012146

https://pediatrics.duke.edu/news/umbilical-cord-blood-improv...

I understand that it happens, my question is the prevalence. When I looked into banking cord blood I found a lot of ‘possible’ and one-off cases, but no actual statistics about how likely it was to be useful. That made it unpalatable, especially compared to the known benefits of delayed clamping.

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