Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year • Hacker News Board

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#61

Post by khafra » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 1:52 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #47

preamble wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not like a blood donation. It's misinformation like this that cause people to sign up to donate, and then back out when they find out what they really have to do. Bone marrow donation is a surgery. PBSC donation requires you to get injected with a drug for 5 days, and then have your blood drawn out from one arm, go through a machine, and passed back to you through the other arm. If you have thin veins it'll e…

Thanks for explaining this! This is why Flynn vs. Holder is so damn important. If the goal is to actually save human lives, more people need to choose to let doctors invade their bodies to take the cells they need, take the time off of work, away from their goals, etc. The only way that most people could do this for a stranger is to be compensated. I predict great things to come!

I'm trying to think of a dollar amount high enough to let somebody stick a tube into my jugular and extend my circulatory system outside my body for hours. I don't think I can count that high; unless I needed the money for fairly immediate survival.

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#62

Post by akuchling » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 2:10 PM UTC

khafra wrote: post #61

maxharris wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for explaining this! This is why Flynn vs. Holder is so damn important. If the goal is to actually save human lives, more people need to choose to let doctors invade their bodies to take the cells they need, take the time off of work, away from their goals, etc. The only way that most people could do this for a stranger is to be compensated. I predict great things to come!

I'm trying to think of a dollar amount high enough to let somebody stick a tube into my jugular and extend my circulatory system outside my body for hours. I don't think I can count that high; unless I needed the money for fairly immediate survival.

It's not as bad as it sounds, though 6 hours is quite a while. Platelet donation is done this way (http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/types-donations/...), taking an hour or two each time, and there are donors who make a platelet donation every two weeks. The blood cools while it's being run through the machine so you get chilly, but donors generally just sit under a blanket and read or watch a DVD for the duration.

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#63

Post by Cass » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #58

patio11 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. This is the only problem. It's false. Well ... it might be false. Extrinsic rewards ($10) tend to displace intrinsic rewards (I saved someone's life!). If th…

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of paying people for bone marrow, but "poor people won't be able to afford bone marrow" is fairly irrelevant as an argument. Poor people already cannot afford to pay for any of the costs associated with a bone marrow transplantation. You have to destroy the patient's immune system to allow the donated blood cells to grow - which means at minimum, if everything goes very well, six weeks in a high-tech isolation room, being treated with extremely expensive antivirals, antibiotics and antifungals, getting all sorts of expensive diagnostics, highly paid specialists taking care of your around the clock, etc.

The last number I heard was, I believe, about 100,000 Euro if everything goes well. If things go wrong, you're looking at the ICU for ~10,000 Euro a day for a month or two, or maybe ten years worth of intense, state-of-the-art immuno-suppressive treatment...

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#64

Post by khafra » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #17

oz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?" He is not more important in an objective sense. Most people would agree in an abstract sense that all lives are equally valuable, but would readily save their child rather than another if it came down to it. Why? Because they value the life of their child more than the life of another's child, and there's absolutely not…

Anyone else see the irony of a community fighting to save a person's life, while ignoring all the other "faceless" sufferers, when the life that they're fighting for probably depends on the good will of a "faceless", anonymous person? Serious question.

Since donors, once added to the database, can save anyone in need who's a match, it doesn't affect the outcome whether HNers join to save Gupta or a faceless stranger.

I guess what's upsetting you is that a community member makes people care enough to get involved, while faceless strangers don't make us care enough to get involved. This seems like the sort of position people realize is incoherent and unsustainable, once they analyze it.

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#65

Post by atakan_gurkan » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 4:58 PM UTC

kens wrote: post #42

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. Ami…

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

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#66

Post by daenz » Sat, Dec 03, 2011, 12:31 AM UTC

homosaur wrote: post #24

daenz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else see the irony of a community fighting to save a person's life, while ignoring all the other "faceless" sufferers, when the life that they're fighting for probably depends on the good will of a "faceless", anonymous person? Serious question.

I'm not sure you know what "irony" means.

Sad time when HN doesn't downvote your non-contributing comment out of spite for my comment.

Re: Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

#67

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 8:35 AM UTC

suivix wrote: post #3

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."

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