With functioning kidneys for all

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907u/kidney-donation

by grosales • 17 years ago

17 17 17 years ago

Tissue engineering, tissue engineering, tissue engineering.

Use stem cells, cancer cells use anything, stick it in a box, put in a filter, keep it external to the body, like one of those new insulin pumps.

Or shrink the dialysis machine down the size of one of those new insulin pumps, and have it on the person 25/7.

Right now I think there's 50/50 chance advancements like that will NOT happen in the US, but in less regulated places like China.

ckinnan• 17 years ago

Sorry, the U.S. government is way too busy spending trillions on banker bailouts and restarting the market for granite countertops and subprime auto loans. Medical research is simply not a priority in the United States. Congress spent nearly 30 times more on AIG than the entire federal cancer research budget.

tc4• 17 years ago

You've hit indirectly on why it's so important that people be able to keep their own money. The brutal reality of the world is that, outside of yourself and some close companions, no one really cares about you or your ability to survive a disease in 40 years. Certainly not politicians in Washington DC. I very much doubt political aristocrats in Beijing care either.

Unsurprisingly, resources get best allocated to what most people actually care about when people get to individually allocate their own resources.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

One of these things is not like the other.

The AIG bailout was emergency spending to prevent economic collapse. It wasn't an ongoing policy initiative. You can argue over whether it's effective or efficient but it's not anything like the cancer budget. That's like saying that, because of the aid after Katrina, building housing and infrastructure on the Gulf Coast is a policy priority.

Yes, there are ways the government could have mitigated or prevented both of these disasters (funding upgrades to the New Orleans levee system, doing a better job at regulating the finance industry, not encouraging homeownership), but you can't compare priorities by comparing emergency spending to ordinary spending. Remember, Congress is incompetent, not evil. They probably didn't anticipate that trillion dollar bailouts would be part of the cost of their policies.

gregwebs2• 17 years ago

I have a solution that costs no money that makes the organ shortage situation much better. It involves enacting one rule:

  A person may only receive an organ if that person is a registered organ donor.

akeefer• 17 years ago

And how exactly would that help? As the article points out, even if everyone were an organ donor that wouldn't significantly impact the massive waiting list. It's also the case that people who are receiving the organs probably aren't the best candidates for organ donation anyway.

gregwebs2• 17 years ago

Yes, it would significantly impact the waiting list, as the article points out! Making everyone a donor would mean the waiting list would start decreasing instead of increasing. To get the list down to zero within a decade (without monetary compensation) you would need that plus other techniques mentioned in the article.

This is a general idea for all organs- most other organs cannot be taken from living people and thus cannot use techniques mentioned in the article.

dmm• 17 years ago

Will donating a kidney significantly shorten my lifespan?

With functioning kidneys for all

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