A look inside China's human organ market

Al Jazeera: "A young woman, posing as a migrant worker from Hebei province, calls a man who has advertised on the website, identified as Mr He. 'I need money,' she says over the phone. 'Do you want a woman's kidney?' Mr He asks her age. Twenty-five, she replies. 'Of course we want your kidney.'"

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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subhan

Man, @kibbee, are you really that naive? What you’d get would be a radical increase in ‘accidental’ deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, and children in poor families. Legalized selling of organs will never be a good idea. How’d you like to have a very large target painted on your forehead because your blood came up a match to the n’th degree to one of the Waltons, who happens to be suffering from liver failure? Or have your wife & neighbor start having an affair & decide to bump you off for the $100K in organ sales instead of just running off to the Bahamas with your retirement fund? Read some Niven for the extremes of where legalized organ harvesting from condemned criminals could take us in a short heart beat. Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.
gwailo_joe

I might sacrifice one of mine for a loved one…

But if a loved one of mine was not compatible with what I had to offer: I might have to harvest one of yours

Would you rather I paid a fair price to you or paid someone else to take one from you, your own loved ones or -someone you don’t even know-?

Eventually, that’s how it’s going to work out, like or not.

Christ: Soilent Green is People and all that rot: but basically the rich takes from the poor: are you really surprised?
CountSmackula

Thus opening the door to the “organ-legging” featured in many dystopian movies, cyberpunk & sci-fi novels.
dirtyid

My uncle got a kidney transplant in China a few years ago.

$10,000 for the kidney

$10,000 for fast tracked surgery and finders fee to the chief of medicine (i.e. bribe)

$5,000 for transportation cost (of the kidney) including police escort from the airport to the hospital

The entire process took 6 days.

There is little incentive for creating a legal a domestic organ market when it already exist overseas. Morality aside, it’s cheaper and insulates our society from the ugly consequences. It’s shitty for China, but when your life or the life of your loved ones are at stake, you will be glad the option is there.
- Anonymous
  
  I don’t know where you are, but “overseas”?
  
  My father bought my stepmonster a kidney in Florida (we’re all Canadian) but they won’t tell the kids how much it cost.
Anonymous

In 10 – 30 years when they perfect cloning of organs watch the price drop out of the black market…that is unless they price the cloned ones to high so harvested ones are still much cheaper.
arbitraryaardvark

I live in a country where abortion is legal and routine, but it’s illegal to save someone’s life by selling them an extra kidney at a fair price. I’d sell my kidney for $100K if it were legal. I am aware of the risks. Of course, if it were legal, I would be underbid. But meanwhile people are dying needlessly. The black market that has resulted isn’t good for either the donors or the recipients. I got approved today to sell my plasma at a place that harvests specific antibodies. But if I wanted to sell my blood,. that would be illegal, so more people are dying needlessly.
- osmo
  
  Since there are no “free contracts” (like “free lunches” the idea of two completely free individuals making a completely free interaction with nothing pressuring them is just not true. If its the need for company growth at all costs or to prove something or desperation, everyone is influenced or forced) a free market have its own unique problems. Just like regulated market has its special problems. When we romanticise either it just comes out wrong.
  
  Take the legal prostitution in some countries. The idea was to do away with the problems of prostitution, to make it something that wasn’t forced on someone due to poverty and drug addiction. It hasn’t. Its still bogged down by the fact that very few prostitutes wants to be prostitutes and claim to feel pressured into it. It still has the same problems and the street prostitution it was ment to stop exists in those same places.
  
  I’m not saying a regulated market solves everything. Just that a free market has its own special problems and to say that it is the shining path (since we’re talking about china ;) ) is to fool one self. If on the other hand you accept the forced part of the free market, then fine. But we should atleast acknowledge that its there and that its a problem.
  - turn_self_off
    
    Data source?
- julianafanana
  
  “I live in a country where abortion is legal and routine…..”
  
  What does that have to do with the price of a kidney in China?
  - rourin_bushi
    
    I believe he’s trying to argue that a legal, regulated organ market would be better for everyone involved.
    - eggonstilts
      
      I think julianafanana was going for a pun on the saying, “What does that have to do with the price of TEA in China?”
      - Anonymous
        
        or, given that it is a kidney: “… the price to pee in China”
      - julianafanana
        
        Actually, I was genuinely curious about what arbitraryaardvark meant by that, but the pun was still intentional. Double whammy, even if I only amuse myself. :P
      - turn_self_off
        
        Best guess, off hand comment about abortion being legal killing of unborn life…
j9c

If there were ever a compelling argument for the culturing of kidneys etc. in tanks or vats etc. from cells taken from healthy donors, like the way they grow sheets of skin to allow skin grafting on burn victims, this would be the place. I don’t have enough real human biology and tissue culture knowledge to know if this is even possible. Any medical researchers reading this thread, wanna chime in? I’m guessing that what’s being done with stem cells these days probably would look like voodoo fifty years ago too. Maybe there is room for hope.

Forget the movies like “Coma,” shows like “Max Headroom” (the pilot show at least) and Snopes-y myths about waking up in a bathtub full of ice cubes, a sutured slit in your side and one kidney short. Even the real life accounts of desperately poor people in India selling their organs. Here’s hoping William Gibson and his peers may be right about one more thing: vat-grown human organs.
irksome

I have a herniated navel I’d be willing to let go for $50.
kibbee

The problem is that there’s probably about 1 organ you can sell. Your kidney. And it’s pretty dangerous. According to a quick Google, (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996325,00.html) the odds of dying from being a kidney donor are 3 in 10,000. Not a risk I’m willing to take for $100,000.
What would be interesting is the ability for your family to sell your organs after you die. Instead of making the organ donor list voluntary, make it so that families people on the list are compensated. Would probably get quite a few more donors, and reduce medical costs overall. As transplant is often cheaper than the ongoing treatment of not getting a transplant.
- Anonymous
  
  Great, so all the suicide risks will have an added incentive to go through with it? And their families have an incentive to cover up any diseases they might have had.
  
  People thought it through pretty thoroughly before saying “no, selling bits of yourself is something that should only be allowed in very rare circumstances”. I know it sucks that the organ donor list is short, but there are better ways to convince people to get on it, e.g. make it opt-out instead of opt-in…
  - billy_ran_away
    
    I know it sucks that the organ donor list is short, but there are better ways to convince people to get on it, e.g. make it opt-out instead of opt-in…
    
    That’s not convincing anyone, that’s just coercion…
- Anonymous
  
  Charging $100,000 for a kidney is not going to reduce the medical costs…
- rebdav
  
  I think a valid concern is what happens when a bankruptcy court demands a kidney, or delivery of the corpse upon death. Will hospitals harvest corpses of the uninsured? Will only the wealthy get buried whole?
Anonymous

@arbitraryaardvark: I feel you, man. I am living in a country where it is illegal to sell an aborted fetus for medical purposes. I would certainly produce and abort a few, for pretty modest money. But as it is, we have an acute shortage of fetal stemcells!

By the way, your idea is brilliant. Imagine if some lazy bum gets behind with his mortgage payments, and we can sue his kidneys and corneas off him! That would be great.

—

In seriousness: some countries do not have opt-in for organ-donorship, but opt-out. As a result, a vast majority are organ donors. I think that’s a good idea. A market for selling your organs is not.