Thursday, February 16, 2006

How to Reduce Third World Poverty and Extend First World Longevity

This article came out a short while ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4719374.stm

Sell off the organs of people in the third world to people in the first world. Callous yes: but if someone in the UK is going to buy a kidney for £23,000 why not let someone in the Kenya (per capita income of $1,100) sell it?
I know, I know. The argument is that if people are motivated by money, they will do things they wouldn't normally do. They'll kill people to harvest organs. They will offer non-human organs in a desperate attempt to grind out cash. The poor will offer up their dead. A century ago, Europeans landed in Africa and took their land and their economic destiny. Now, we're back for their corneas and lungs.
Opportunities come when possibilities butte into conventions. If the North revolutionizes their organ transplant system to presume harvesting, this opportunity will disappear. If research yields the ability to clone individual organs, we will never need a donor organ and again the opporunity will disappear. There is maybe a 10 year window where people need organs and they could be obtained through sales. Take just the UK as an example: of the 400 per year who die for lack of transplants what if 200 could get those organs? Say the going rate for these organs is £2o,000 each. That's £4,000,000 (+/- $7,000,000 Cdn)/year of money that could land in the Third world. Multiply that by the 10 or so nations who have the means to pay for purchased organs and the window of opportunity before technology makes this as viable as the 8-track. $700 million dollars could go to donors in the South in exchange for approximately 5,000 donors who each gave up kidneys, liver, heart, lungs and a grocery list of needed organs. Do you think 5000 people in the South who could serve as viable donors won't die in the next decade?
The best way to end poverty is to cut down on the number of poor people. If you give a poor household 40 years of income, they are no longer poor. More than that, we're talking about $40,000 for a kidney. Multiply the yield by all of the organs up for salvage and a donor could yield a half million dollars. This tremendous in flux in cash could certainly help a local economy as so-n-so down the street now has a house, a car and so do their ten relatives. There will be some fraud. Nouveau Riche will have gunmen show up at their house and drive away with their cars. Hucksters will keep their cash for safe keeping and never give it back. Depsite the chances that the money will end up in the wrong hands, I like the idea that some of the money will end up in the right hands.
Because it will take too long to ship an organ: donors and recipients will have to be brought closer to one another. Hospitals/resorts in the South will pop-up. They will have to be surgically clean and stable (e.g. running water and 24x7 electricity). That stability requires infrastructure. These hospital resorts will need to make that stability for themselves. The side effect is that once you build the system, others can use it. This could almost make for transplant tourism. A Casablanca for kidneys.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

3D objects with lasers

According to this site:
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology uses lasers to project "real" 3D images into the ether. A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air -- previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope...