> Thanx for putting me straight on this, I think - I'll check the URL's later.
> I'll also inform the director of security ;-), I would love to see the look
> on his face when he reads this.
:-) Just be careful - some people react badly when they realize they
have been wrong. Which is itself an interesting area of study in applied
memetics.
> is this not 'merely' a matter of having a large & varied supply, and the
> ability for storage? (How long can you store a kidney?)
As others have pointed out, you just have 36 hours or so to find
a recipient, and I guess even less time if you don't have modern
medical facilities. This is one reason I wish Mike Darwin and his
friends good luck at BioPreservation Inc - even if their methods
don't produce better cryonics, they might very well improve organ
storage.
Having a varied supply is an interesting possibility, but since
you have to replace it every 36 hours it would be *very* expensive
and quickly produce a huge number of "missing kidney cases" (several
hundred every year for every organ ring).
> I'm still having some difficulty with the free market solution to a problem
> like this (the ethics of an abundant amount of artificial replacements are
> so much easier).
> I agree with you for the most part but something is nagging me about all this.
> Maybe it just takes some getting use to ;-)
Yes, it is a somewhat touchy question. I'm still not 100% convinced that
a free market solution is ideal, but so far I have found more problems
on the non-profit side than the market side. Perhaps there is a third
way?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y