Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/amit-gupta-marrow-transplant/

by sbashyal • 15 years ago

133 62 15 years ago

suivix• 15 years ago

Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

SandB0x2• 15 years ago

Ignoring your horrific lack of tact and sensitivity: From http://amitgupta.com/

> In the past... I started Jelly, worked with Seth Godin to start ChangeThis, brought BarCamp to NYC, started a co-op called House 2.0, contributed to a WSJ best-seller with Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki and others, and started a venture-backed company called The Daily Jolt while in college. I enjoy camping.

ineedtosleep2• 15 years ago

He actually brings a point I've been wondering since the entire thing started: Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?

Downvote me to oblivion if necessary, but this really is a genuine question which, by the looks of things, has the answer of: His life is more important than everyone else on the transplant list.

OoTheNigerian• 15 years ago

Instead of down-voting, people should explain.

"Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.?"

I see it this way: He is a part of the start up community to which we belong to. If something affects one of us, we should try to help. We do not live in a vacuum where only code and startups are important and not the people who help make them.

chunkyslink• 15 years ago

I hope you are never in the situation where you need help. There could be a chance that someone from this community can have their life saved and you want to complain about it.

Just skip over the link if you dont want to read it. WTF. Its not hard.

tdoggette2• 15 years ago

Amit Gupta's influence on bone marrow registration will uncertainly save several lives over the next decades. The role of technology and the associated community is an important part of that story.

It's certainly one of the factors in my decision to sign up with the registry.

[http://marrow.org could use the touch of a UX designer, but the signup process is straightforward enough.]

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

Unless you think all the people upvoting don't fall into the good hackers category (and how could you know that if you did think so), that it is so highly upvoted should give you a clue.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

He's in our Monkeysphere.

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

nitrogen• 15 years ago

FWIW: It looks like this post got your account auto-killed.

callmevlad• 15 years ago

"But we’re sort of in wait-and-pray mode because historically, only half of South Asians who are tested actually agree to donate."

Not only is the chance of finding South Asians to get a DNA test very low, but that chance is further sliced by half because a matched donor can get cold feet.

I really hope that those people who were identified as a match come through for Amit (or others in need).

tdoggette2• 15 years ago

Look, if you sign up, you sign up to actually give marrow if there's a match. Period. Unless you're not healthy enough, there's no excuse for welching on a deal that involves someone's life.

naz• 15 years ago

How wrong it is to flake is irrelevant. You can't really force someone to undergo surgery.

jpulgarin• 15 years ago

You can avert an infant death for $1000.

maxharris3• 15 years ago

But it's not really a deal if you don't get paid.

Up until today, it was illegal to seal the deal (i.e., pay your donor). Now that people actually have a rational financial reason to trade a little bit of their own lives to strangers (needlesticks aren't painless, and donors need to sit for hours to actually donate the cells), they'll go through with it a lot more. The donors win, and the recipients win. That's a great thing!

patio113• 15 years ago

You guys may be interested in Flynn vs. Holder, which is a court case attempting to strike down the federal prohibition on selling bone marrow.

If you could buy and sell bone marrow, all parties agree that that would happen more frequently than bone marrow donation. The side that believes that would be bad won.

(A brief sketch of the concern: if you allow money into the equation, either a) people who won the marrow lottery could extort money from folks who are dying or b) poor people would be hooked up to machines and have their vital juices sucked out so that rich people could live. A brief sketch of the argument for allowing bone marrow sales: the present law guarantees persistent market undersupply of bone marrow, which, with certainty, kills people.)

learc83• 15 years ago

The only way to tell what will happen is to run a trial. That way we can stop conjecturing, and see what actually happens. My guess is it would work pretty well.

blhack2• 15 years ago

It's a moral minefield. When people get desperate for money, they're willing to do things that they might later regret. This is why things like loan sharks tend to be illegal (and why, one could argue, auto title loans and the like should be as well. In that case it's a matter of collective versus individual intelligence. Collectively, an auto title loan service is far more intelligent than an individual, and they are thus able to be predatory in their lending practices [to great success]).

I'm not equating selling your organs with loan sharking, but I believe it illustrates my point.

(Donating your organs to get yourself out of extreme financial hardship could be considered a form of duress. This is one of the classic arguments against prostitution.)

maxharris3• 15 years ago

As you've pointed out, the alternative for those who need these cells (but can't get them) is death. I agree completely.

But the argument for the other side isn't sound. Poor people (with the right haplotype at the right time) could become quite rich if we don't try to interfere with bone marrow sales. Do you know what I'd pay for cells that would save my life if I needed them? Quite a lot more than I paid for my car.

bentlegen• 15 years ago

I think it is more likely that some company would get quite rich - not the people who initially possessed the marrow.

uptown• 15 years ago

I'll admit I haven't read the case you references, but once you build a financial marketplace around something, it will get controlled, manipulated and exploited. Why stop at bone marrow? Everybody's got a couple kidneys ... why not let people sell one? What about the donors who regularly give blood donations today? Would they stop doing so without being paid? I believe it's an oversimplification to just say that the current system kills people by design and that adding money will make it operate more effectively.

ars3• 15 years ago

> Why stop at bone marrow?

I would draw a very clear line: Renewable tissue and organs can be sold, non renewable ones can't.

Blood, sperm, marrow: All sellable.

Kidneys: Nope, donation only.

Liver, skin: On the fence. (They renew, but only with scarring, and can be taken only a limited number of times.)

patio113• 15 years ago

Not to fight this battle with you in the comments, but a) you only get two kidneys but bone marrow is, like blood cells, a replenishable resource and b) it is absolutely, unequivocally the case that paying people for blood, plasma, and gamete donations (all of which we do, but we're circumspect about saying so) increases the amount of people who are willing to participate in blood, plasma, and gamete donation.

The biology of plasma is different than the biology of bone marrow, which complicates things considerably, but the biology of plasma did not solve the plasma problem. We used to have plasma shortages, too, because plasma donation is inconvenient and strikes some people as "icky." So we increased people's willingness to engage in it by using our traditional method of encouraging inconvenient, icky things: we paid them money.

othermaciej• 15 years ago

Not quite. The recent decision by the Ninth Circuit lets the prohibition stand as to bone marrow directly extracted from bones, but struck it down as to bone-marrow-derived stem cells extracted from blood. This should significantly increase the availability of donated bone marrow:

http://volokh.com/2011/12/01/paying-people-for-bone-marrow-d...

patio113• 15 years ago

Whoopsie. I was unaware there was news on that front in the last 48 hours -- when I said "This side won", I meant "When drawing up the legislation twenty years ago."

kens• 15 years ago

One interesting thing about Amit Gupta's efforts to get people to register their bone marrow is he's actually helping other people much more than he's helping himself. The key point is that everyone who needs bone marrow is more likely to find a match because of the additional registrants.

Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? It's kind of the opposite of tragedy of the commons or free-rider. Amit's actions actually seems structurally similar to contributing to open-source software: he's trying to solve his own problem, but at the same time helping thousands of other people.

In any case, you should sign up - wouldn't it be great to save someone's life in this way?

yogrish• 15 years ago

Yes Amit is in a way helping people who are getting registered. So guys, pls help Amit. Btw, Nice parallel drawn.

gajomi• 15 years ago

>Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this?

From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearly-neutrally fit cooperator".

In public goods games cooperators increase the amount of public goods available to everyone, but if there is some cost to producing the good they can be subject to invasion by defectors. Amit's campaign definitely benefits everyone in the community more or less equally, but the cost to him (determined by the additional opportunities he might have had to find a donor for himself through some other means) are presumably quite low to the point where we can consider them to be zero. Since both cooperators and defectors pay nothing but receive the same benefit, they are equally fit and no relative fraction of strategies employed by the population is preferred (although having more cooperators should contribute to a higher overall payoff).

The interesting little twist to the story, if we are thinking in terms of evolutionary game theory, is that players that reach a certain payoff (e.g., by getting there transplant), leave the game with some probability! This is the opposite of what usually happens in games in evolutionary biology, since higher absolute payoff is typically associated with larger population sizes.

atakan_gurkan• 15 years ago

Not a game-theoretic name, but in evolutionary theory such behaviours with similar outcomes are called "kin selection" or "group selection". IMHO, the former is more on the point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection

herbdean• 15 years ago

Mike makes a good comment - The one thing that the article does not explain is that all swabs go into a national database. If you give a sample in a drive to save somebody that you know, you could end up getting a call 10 years later saying that you match somebody else on the other side of the country

Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

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