Fri 30 Nov 2007
How would you price out the human body, if we’re willing to assume willing sellers and willing buyers?
Certainly there are limited white- and black-market examples that exist already, from organ transplantation (and organ harvesting!) to blood donation and sperm banks. But let’s assume it’s all fair game: you’re willing to sell any part of your body to a willing buyer — assuming you could live, at least a short while, to enjoy the profits.
So, what are you selling, and what’s it worth to you? How many kidneys equal a liver? Can you spare an eye? What’s the angle on a healthy human heart vs. an artificial model?
Posted by Josh MillardOkay, let's hear it.
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This question need not be hypothetical, if you know what I mean…I know a guy.
Okay, for starters, let’s think of body parts we have but don’t necessarily need. The last three toes on each foot (the non-flipflop toes). I’d let those go for three thousand a piece. I don’t know who’d want them, though.
I am so glad it was a funeral director who got first dibbs on this! Go ColdChef.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter what price I ask, there will undoubtedly be someone else who will sell it for lower – someone down on their luck or from an impoverished country.
That is, an open market would quickly take the price down to close to zero. Even for essential organs (i.e. donation=fatal) there will probably be someone who will sacrifice themselves for the monetary gain of their family.
I would gladly sell one of my eyes, because all the cool people only have one anyway. Going price: $50k; Canadian or US $ depending on the exchange rate.
I’m not sure impoverished countries would corner the market. There are other factors to consider. Wouldn’t you want a healthy set of arms instead of malnourished ones?
And…I’m not sure I even want to go here…wouldn’t skin color affect the going rate?
There likely would still be a premium, though, for organs taken from a strong and healthy person. Donors from impoverished countries are more likely to have medical problems that make a transplant less effective. So you may be able to get some cash for your liver after all (if the laws are changed dramatically).
I doubt an open market would bring the price close to zero. You have to take into account that while there are people willing to let themselves killed for monetary gain, they are dispersed through the world adding shipping and care to the equation.
To look at this another way: I would totally pay $2000 for an extra finger on each of my hands. How creepy would that be? A lifetime of scaring little kids? Awesome.
Organ shipment isn’t that expensive or complicated.
If you want it to actually work in the recipient’s body I guess that yes, it’s complicated.
ColdChef – But then you’d have Inigo Montoya out looking for you.
The real money is not in solid organs, but in tissues; bone for grafting, corneas, skin, heart valves are all commonly used and because they can go to many people, the potential income is greater.
But given that most people are probably thinking of organs, I would say that if you plan to live to enjoy your money that you are limited to paired organs like lungs or kidneys, or organs like the liver where you can donate a lobe and it will regrow. I would expect that in developed countries kidneys would go for tens of thousands (as there is the alternative of dialysis) lungs and livers would bee well up in the hundreds of thousands, as they are essential for life and there is no artificial version. Things like pancreases and intestines would probably be in the middle, as they are not exactly essential for life, but not having a fully functional one would significantly decrease the quality of the donors life. A related question is who would pay the donor’s medical expenses?
The internet says that in 1999 there was a proposal in Pennsylvania to give US$300 to organ donors (actually their family) to cover funeral expenses. Did this happen?
I know I’ve seen a chart of organ prices by country but so far I can’t unearth it.
Link as I mucked up the href tag in my previous comment.
I love how saying that helps me find it.
Nice. Now I know where I’ll go to get transplants when I need them.
Replying to my own question, no. It never came to pass. It was deemed an insult to organ donors families.
SERIOUSLY depends on the organ. nudge.
My organs would be pretty much worthless to anyone, they’ve suffered years of constant abuse. Which leads me to…why do we assume organs in Westerns countries are better? Fatty foods, excess sugar, excessive alcohol, drugs – the kidneys or liver of someone subsisting on mainly rice and vegetables, with a little sacramental beverage or the occasional herb to treat illness, for eg, are going to be far better than someone on SSRIs who drinks HFCS-laden coke and eats McDs every day.
“Any mosquito biting me is going to have to book into the Betty Ford clinic”, as Patsy said.
<a href=”This organ will cost you an arm and a leg.
Beyond organs, beyond tissues, what of the progenitors of these structures, the stem cells? They may have the highest potential value of all… if you can use donor stem cells (allograft) in a person.
I like how I almost didn’t screw up that link.
Hm. I would think most everything would be tens of thousands at least, and some organs would get up into the hundreds of thousands. A heart from a really healthy athlete…possibly millions
I know one organ of mine that is worth a lot
. . . to your mom!
Do we have the offensive/sexism/racism flag here? Cause the BBQ was cool when it first started, but it has kind of turned into a boyzone ever since I started typing this comment. I miss the old BBQ.
A grading scale according to how healthy the organ is could be used.
Do you smoke? Yes? Oh, sorry. That’s $300 less for one of your lungs, and $100 less for each year since you started smoking.
*deregisters*
If I’m gonna go through a living donation, it’s gonna be ova.
Things like pancreases and intestines would probably be in the middle, as they are not exactly essential for life
Help me out here, because I don’t know much of anything about intestines, but: we’re talking about a lot of tubage in the large and small intestines, right? Feet, maybe yards of the stuff? I wonder what the going rate would be per foot—and how short of a length is too short to bother with?
Josh, you’re right–size matters.
Can these parts be leased? Purchasing seems expensive.
Depends on when I have to deliver. If I have to have pieces cut off of me while I’m still alive, then no. You can’t have any of my organs. They’re mine.
But if you’re patient enough to wait for me to die (or almost die) to use them, then we can do business. Of course, every moment that I’m using my organs they go down in value, but here’s how I think we can make this work:
Pay me some large some of money upfront. Every year, I’ll pay back a certain portion of that, to reflect the falling value of my organs.
Basically, it’s like a giant no-interest loan that you give me in exchange for my dead body at the end of it. Because you’re paying up front and I’m paying you back only while I’m alive, you won’t have the incentive to… hurry the process along.
And in the mean time, I’ll put my money into an annuity and live off of the interest.
Long ago I read Bill, the Galactic Hero and I vividly remember that Bill had had an arm replacement as a result of war wounds — a black right arm had been grafted in place of his missing white left arm. “So Bill stayed up all night shaking hands with himself.”
Anyhoo.
Organ donation and transplant is such a crude methodology. Things will be much, much simpler when we figure out how to regrow organs in situ. I’m of the ignorantly optimistic opinion that that day is closer than we anticipate.
With any luck and lotsa research, the trade in human organs will go the way of the dodo.
Unlocking another Pandora’s box of ethical dilemmas that I haven’t started thinking about yet.
And I need “preview” something fierce.
A friend of friend died recently because two successive liver transplant failed.
Selling or buying body parts is messy and very sad.
It’s just about desperation and fear of death on the buyer side, about desperation and abject poverty on the seller side. The fact that it is happening doesn’t make it right: it ranks alongside slavery and child abuse among disgusting human behaviors you’d like to eradicate.
The proximate future lies in growing replacement parts from your own cells in a vat. A few years after, you should be able to induce the same process directly from inside your body.
Meanwhile, I can offer a more lighthearted question:
If you could upload your mind into the Web (all deluxe options included: ubiquity, eternity, redundancy) and the price would be to sell all your body parts with no possibility to ever download back into a body, would you do it?
Obviously: what BOP said.
Listen, no living person is going to sell his or her pancreas.
RE: intestine – I know you can do with having a lot of it removed; you can have your entire colon removed and live. The small intestine, people used to get jejuno-ileal bypasses, reversible surgeries that bypassed all but 12-18 inches of the intestine. Predictably, patients suffered from vitamin deficiencies, but they could (and still do) live for many years after the surgery.
Ovaries. I don’t want mine, but I’m not about to let the rich infertile people who want college-educated, nonsmoking, multilingual, high-SAT-scoring surrogate eggs know that.
tagging onto what casarkos said – the number of times I’ve wished death on those organis during TTOTM
I don’t know if I’d sell my organs for anything less than a couple million. Let’s just say I sell a kidney, and then my other kidney fails down the road. I want to be sure that (a) I can afford a new kidney, having calculated inflation into the mix. If complications arise after I’ve sold that first kidney, I want to know that either the buyer is required by contract to pay for all healthcare relating to the donated organ or that I’ve got plenty of cash to pay the doctors’ bills myself.
But also, I’d have to be pretty desperate to sell off a kidney, or a lung, or any of my body parts at all. A finger? I’d have to learn how to type all over again. A toe? Maybe I’d charge a little less for my pinky toe, but only if the nail was painted green and it was going to be used for awesome hilariousness. Still, I’d be without a pinky toe for life. So I’d still have to charge a really good chunk of cash.
I’m kind of attached to my body and all of its parts. Except maybe some of the fat. I suppose that if someone wanted to perform liposuction on me and harvest my extra fat, I would only charge, say, five hundred bucks per pound.
According to these guys, it would seem you can get a full body for as low as €3500.
(achtung, shameless self-link)
If I’m gonna go through a living donation, it’s gonna be ova.
It’s not ova until the fat lady delivers.
Hey I may be fat but it’s not congenital! A beautiful singing voice, dimples and unbeatable boggle skillz may be.
I’d sell my pancreas and last I checked I was living. *checks again* Yep, still breathing. However, I have diabetes so my pancreas isn’t exactly in prime condition. Maybe a researcher wants it? But no, most living people who have half a brain would not sell a pancreas that’s in good working order. Believe me, you don’t want to be on meds/inject insulin/avoid carbs for the rest of your life. It well and truly sucks.
Oh, I would donate ovum but I don’t know who’d want them with my health problems. They’d have to be pretty desperate. Shit, I can’t even give away blood or bone marrow.
:-(
Last time I looked I think you could get $3000 for eggs in Texas, as long as you were under 35, good health, etc.
Kim Stanley Robinson suggested in a SF book (Mars series) that each person would be allowed .75 child credits. Combine with someone, and be allowed 1.5 children. Since you can’t have half a child, you can sell your .5 credit to another couple who wants a second child. This would establish the value of human life.
The problem is not just in being a seller – you have to have a buyer who’s compatible.
Once that’s in line, being a seller is not the same thing as selling voluntarily. It takes a mentality that I certainly don’t have to be willing to let go of things even as trivial as back teeth and pinky toes.
I think I could do pretty well without a left arm. I broke it earlier this year, and couldn’t use it, and after a weeks, could cope pretty well. And honestly, it’d be a bit easier if it was just gone entirely, because having it sitting there in a sling, getting in the way, just was a pain.
I imagine arms would be pretty valuable, in the grand scheme of things. And it would be pretty useful to have two left arms… one takes care of the front, one the back.
I wouldn’t sell any part of my body unless I could net enough $$$ to buy a decent Manhattan apartment.
So say that my target apartment is $700K.
Here’s what I’d sell :
Earlobes
Pinky toes
possibly other toes if they didn’t effect my walking
I would probably throw in my pinky fingers if they made it a cool 1.5M
And before doing anything, I’d probably post an AskMe to the effect of, “Hey ladies… Would you date a guy with no earlobes, pinky toes, or pinky fingers?”
The problem is not just in being a seller – you have to have a buyer who’s compatible.
Which raises the question of what the body-part brokerage industry would look like, if widespread buying and selling was legal and common. Brick-and-morter vs. internet parts sales?
internet parts sales
Imagine the spam!
Some people are more than willing to give up their body parts. Personally, i’d give up both my breasts for $500,000, but maybe i’m only saying that since i’m an A cup and used to doing without.
My practice with my last 3 cars has been to basically run them into the ground until they had no resale/trade-in value then do the “donate to charity and get tax deduction” thing. I mention that because I have just noticed that I am doing the same thing with my body. So, no, I don’t think I have anything worth recycling now, or upon my death.
And the “live hard, die young” thing does NOT “leave a beautiful corpse”.
Ovaries. I don’t want mine, but I’m not about to let the rich infertile people who want college-educated, nonsmoking, multilingual, high-SAT-scoring surrogate eggs know that.
Ovaries do more than produce and release eggs, so even though mine will likely cause trouble later, if I take after a certain part of my family (and I think I do), taking them out is an option I’m not willing to consider unless it’s life-threatening, even though some of the hormone production can be replaced through hormone therapy.
I can see the logic in selling eggs, although I wouldn’t, myself. That’s selling my genes, and is a much bigger deal to me. Cells and organs die with the donor. It’s a one-time gift or sale. Genes are the only biological thing you get to leave behind you, if you leave anything. And you get no direct say in what happens next. Selling mine would not be my contribution to the gene pool.
The proximate future lies in growing replacement parts from your own cells in a vat. A few years after, you should be able to induce the same process directly from inside your body.
I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think prosthetics that incorporate some biological components and provide all or most of the organ’s functionality are far closer in technological reach. Think artificial heart valves, only more complicated. Cellular development is just so complicated, especially when it’s a group of cells growing together organized as an organ. And even though we can grow some cells in cultures, growing an organ would require many things that I don’t think we’ll ever be able to provide in vitro (like bloodflow or something similar). Even if something starts in a vat, it seems likely it would need to be moved to a host to fully develop.
I don’t think anyone could offer me enough money for any of my organs. Really. I’ve had a really fortunate health history. No bones broken, no major illnesses, get sick infrequently, shake it off fairly fast. Rarely take medication. It’s not been perfect health, but the issues are and have been relatively minor (reactive hypoglycemia, nearsighted, and I’ve pushed my body kind of hard for a few periods of time. That’s worth a lot to me. Money really isn’t. I’ve seen friends struggle with their own health problems fairly young– bleeding brain, Crohn’s disease, other less easily diagnosed digestive problems. I might donate an organ to a close friend or a family member, and I’ll donate everything when I die if anything’s harvestable (signed up already). But I wouldn’t donate anything for money, even if it was legal and easy.
Yeah I’m in perfect health with the exception of very treatable anxiety (I take meds maybe twice a month) and get this: all my grandparents are still alive. It’s a vigorous family history. My great-grandfather finally died by falling down the stairs at 93, after which he still made it to the pub where he got a beer, though he had to use a straw to drink it. He then went to the hospital for his broken neck and passed.
I looked into egg donation, if you’re really “good stock” you can make plenty of money, but it’s time consuming and invasive, and as a non-breeder, pro-adoption person, ethically undesireable. I’m tall, white, blonde, smart and all that valuable stuff, so the question for me has always been: couldn’t I make more as a whorewhore than an genewhore? Not such a big difference.
I’ll sell a lung lobe for $60,000 no questions asked. I’ll part with a kidney for $120,000. That, invested, will buy me another and pay for my medical care if it comes to be necessary.
Things will be much, much simpler when we figure out how to regrow organs in situ. I’m of the ignorantly optimistic opinion that that day is closer than we anticipate.
I sure wish somebody had mentioned this before I extracted a pint of my own bone marrow with a Black and Decker cordless drill and a turkey baster. Now I just have to soak the label off this empty Miracle Whip jar, and eBay, here I come.
I was catching up on my feeds and came across this article on the concept of repugnance, and the need to account for it in economics. I’m mildly amazed that we haven’t diverged into the meta-discussion about the morality of selling body parts. Demonstrably, since it’s currently illegal to sell body parts, the American public looks down their collective nose at the concept of an open market for body parts. Is there an ethical dilemma here, or do people just feel “icky” when discussing chopping out parts of their bodies?
Going back in time to 1992, one of the seminal works on the subject was Jim Hogshire’s Sell Yourself to Science:
a human kidney was recently offered for sale on the Internet auction site eBay-and bidding reached $5.7 million before the company stopped it
Don’t know about the cost of the body parts but the cost of the containment, here:
identification, storage, and containment of corpses
The Case for Mandatory Organ Donation
$15,000 for a kidney and $32,000 for a piece of liver
Since I had hepatitis A, are any of my body parts still useful to anyone after death? As a cadaver to med students? And if I could sell my body after death, who would buy it? And could I leave the money to my sister?
I have pondered selling or donating eggs.
I once offered eggs to someone I knew. I would have expected all medical costs to have been covered by her. If I was selling them to strangers, I think I’d have been asking upwards of $5000.
Now I’m over 30, my eggs are pretty much considered past their prime and more or less worthless(!).
Anyone for an omelet?
Oh, and since living in the UK for several years in the early 1990’s the Australian Blood Bank will not accept my blood. So, being an ex-smoking Mad Cow with Multiple Sclerosis and a fondness for wine, I think I’ve negated any resale value on anything, apart from for curiosity value only.
(A big parenthetical congratulations to nickyskye for managing to write an excellent comment that nonetheless fooled the spamfilter into thinking it was junk. I imagine it was the combination of multiple links and discussion of body parts. Oops!
Sorry for the whiplash, nicky!)
Demonstrably, since it’s currently illegal to sell body parts, the American public looks down their collective nose at the concept of an open market for body parts. Is there an ethical dilemma here, or do people just feel “icky” when discussing chopping out parts of their bodies?
Probably both, but if there’s an ickiness factor, I doubt it’d be that hard to overcome. We don’t look down our noses at selling ova or sperm, after all, which would seem to be a whole lot more intimate and fraught with weird ethical repercussions than a kidney or pinky toe (I’m still trying to figure out who’d buy all these friggin’ pinky toes). And we look down on selling blood in only a classist way.
We collectively praise and admire people who donate their own liver lobes, kidneys, bone marrow, especially if they do it for strangers rather than relatives. Maybe it’s the prospect of individually profiting off of other people’s dire suffering and desperation that’s repugnant? Which sounds insane when you consider all the other ways our culture does that constantly. The only organ/portion I’d feel secure forking over would be a liver chunk, and I don’t know if I could accept money for it beyond expenses and live with myself. Largely I think the law prevents it because of the logistical, pragmatic, regulatory, quality-control nightmares we envision arising in a sanctioned worldwide for-profit body parts market.
Some of the (non-medical ethics) ethical considerations seem to be the same ones related to prostitution, body modification, etc.: does each of us own her/his body and life, and if so, how far do we extend the owner’s right to choose what’s done with them or to conduct whatever financial transactions we see fit with regard to them?
Meanwhile, I’ll give you 20 bucks for those freckles.
I would sell my hair pretty cheap, provided my hair was only used for the following purposes:
1) Wigs For Cancer Patients
2) Mats To Soak Up Oil Spills
3) L-cysteine For Baked Goods.
According to Wikipedia, “There is some debate whether or not consuming L-cysteine derived from human hair constitutes cannibalism.”
Now, I don’t know about you but when I think about baked goods, I think about my Grandmother. She would wake up every morning and whip up a big fresh batch of L-cysteine using only the finest imported hair. I can still see her as she worked, humming over her mixing bowl, feeding in handful after handful of black hair… the hair was imported mainly from China. MY GRANDMOTHER, GOD REST HER SOUL, WAS NOT A CANNIBAL!
You’re, uh. Hmm. You’re gonna want to avoid the soylent green. Just trust me on this, Fuzzy Monster.
*looks up from a big heaping platter of soylent green*
What?
*looks back down at the platter of soylent green*
Oh my God! GRANDMA!
There’s one country which does not have a shortage of human kidneys for transplant. Iran. There’s one country which has a regulated, paid market for human kidneys from live donors. Iran. Coincidence?
I wonder if I can get a tax deduction in installments for donating everything postmortem (or post-consciousness).
Imagine the accounting there, ersatz: you take advance payment (be it a tax break, or cash, or an annuity of some sort as suggested upthread) on guarantee of delivery of body parts—and then Something Bad Happens.
Maybe you smoke your lungs out, or lose a hand to a shirt-folding machine, or a chance illness ruins your liver. If the folks managing your body part account are doing diligent periodic checkups, they’ll have a chance to adjust the policy while you’re alive. I’d be curious what the contracts would look like, and how the adjustment process would proceed.
And what about contract-disrupting injuries incurred upon death? Cessation of annuity is one thing, but what if you were paid an advance lump? Is it to your estate or your heirs to make amends? Does their liability depend on the determination of fault/accident in your death (and dismemberment)?
And I can’t wait for the Sub-prime Organ fiasco.
Via Freakonomics: free kidneys for Jesus.
Sir, I want to sell my One Kidney.
So i want to how much money i received and where i sell it.
Well, Josh? The gentleman asked you a question. (Sort of.)
I’ll have to, uh, check with my kidney guy.