THS / BioTech: Organlegger efficiency

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

So far, there is a lot the human brain can do that software simply can't do even remotely as well. That might change, or it might not.

But very, very few of those things are things that we could make an extracted human brain do for us. It's not totally impossible for that to change before figuring out how to solve those problems in software, but it's certainly not the way I would bet.

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Maybe a matured, adult brain with experiences is required. Sure, might take longer to grow and experience can be simulated with feelies, but some shady people might take shortcuts.

What are they doing with the brain that requires experiences, but not cooperation?

Originally Posted by CeeDub

That would raise a lot of questions when friends and family see the body of their missing loved one by chance, or when the government matches the face to a missing persons report.

What face? What body? After you've harvested everything useful from a body, you don't just leave the scraps lying around unless you're operating in a place where there's effectively no risk of investigation.

Stealing only a few organs is still a blatantly obvious crime unless nobody does any kind of autopsy on the murder victim. Might work if you're positioned so that the death isn't considered suspicious at all, otherwise it's totally pointless.

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Good points. What about backwaters where culturing human tissue (or importing it) is illegal?

How do you figure they'd have that rule, but allow transplants at all?

[CeeDub]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What face? What body? After you've harvested everything useful from a body, you don't just leave the scraps lying around unless you're operating in a place where there's effectively no risk of investigation.

That was a response to a suggestion about just removing the brain and using the body for a whole body transplant. Besides, "invasion of the body snatchers" is not the kind of horror I was going for.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

How do you figure they'd have that rule, but allow transplants at all?

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Cloning humans, maybe. Doing stuff with stem cells? Basically nobody cares. Embryonic-sourced stem cells have some political trouble, basically as a penumbra to the conflict over abortion, but that's about where you get the stem cells rather than about using stem cells.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

There's also the fact that, unless I'm missing something, organleggers are by definition operating outside of the law. They may well do their best business in places where organ transplants - regardless of organ source - are illegal (probably for religious reasons), working alongside black market clinics to provide the organs needed for the illegal transplant work. Such places, of course, may not be plentiful enough (or busy enough) to really have much of an organlegging industry.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

There's also the fact that, unless I'm missing something, organleggers are by definition operating outside of the law. They may well do their best business in places where organ transplants - regardless of organ source - are illegal (probably for religious reasons), working alongside black market clinics to provide the organs needed for the illegal transplant work. Such places, of course, may not be plentiful enough (or busy enough) to really have much of an organlegging industry.

If organ transplants are (meaningfully) illegal, that's likely to brutally cut into demand.

Getting an organ transplant done covertly or sketchily is one thing, learning that you need an organ transplant without anybody being in on that fact is hard. And so is maintaining the after-transplant care you'll likely require.

Unless enforcement doesn't bother to look into cases where someone 'miraculously' recovers from something that they shouldn't without a transplant, you'd have to basically have a firm conspiracy wrapped around your health from before you got the diagnosis. Otherwise your life will be pretty visible cause for criminal investigation. That's a much bigger problem than needing to make sure the genuine origin of your transplant organ is obscure but everything else being aboveboard.