> Wife-husband team Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel are on a very personal mission to find a cure to prion diseases. When Sonia was diagnosed as a genetic carrier of a rare disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), she and Eric quit their regular jobs and began studying molecular biology to learn as much as they could.
Radiolab had a fascinating segment on US blood banks and how cutthroat the blood economy can be. In many cases, your local blood bank might be arbitraging blood from different areas of the country.
It's so amazing that it works! (Donor here as well.) I would love to see the support system expanded. Even with the recipient's insurance footing the bill for the surgery, there's still a significant burden on donors to be able to provide the time off to do the transplant in many cases.
I can imagine this is a problem for many potential donors. As a software dev, I was on vacation for three weeks. Of course, I mainly sit and type while I work and have unlimited vacation.
But I can definitely see this being a problem for those who are not as fortunate in their work.
I scheduled mine over the holidays, and it worked out very nicely. Additionally, it meant I was around my family for any necessary support during recovery. All in all, it was very smooth.
Poor people are the most likely to be exploited and the most likely to use their donated organs. It's been shown that empirically economically incentivising organ donation crowds out altruistic organ donation, a non negligible source of supply and that those who donate for money do not experience a long term economic benefit but do experience long term health consequences.
So what? That's up to them. People who buy organs are paying a fair price. Why do you want to infantalize poor people by denying them the opportunity to participate in the market?
By ignoring the reality of the situation you create a demand for people to cause severe risks to their health for short term problems, preying on the least educated group of people who have a severe information asymmetry... You also crowd out an altruistic source as it no longer becomes a societal issue but rather an economic one.
You also create an unnecessary class problem as middle and upper class people have access to organs, but not poor people who are the actual source of supply...
