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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Organlegging | ||
| Technology needed to deal in illicitly obtained body parts. |
As far as I know, Niven was the first writer to really work with a topic that is just starting to become a problem, thanks to drugs that make transplantation viable.
What happens when the need for "spare parts" exceeds the supply - the organs that are produced by chance events, like car crashes? You could start with the criminals, like an organlegger who had stolen another person's life to make his body into spare parts. First, you cool the body to the point where preservation of delicate body structures is possible -
| The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them. When the organlegger's body temperature reached a certain point, the belt started.
The first machine made a series of incisions in his chest. Skillfully and mechanically, the doctor performed a cardiectomy. The organlegger was officially dead. His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital's organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment's notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken. Which was the whole point. |
| Technovelgy from The Jigsaw Man,
by Larry Niven. Published by Not Available in 1967 Additional resources -
|
The term is a corruption of the word "bootlegger." This story is in several collections of Niven's works - highly recommended.
The ultimate danger, when a citizen could live for as long as possible if enough organs were available?
In Anne McCaffrey's 1990 novel Pegasus in Flight, street children are stockpiled for later use as organ donors:
The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote agains eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.
Until we have the right to use infertility drugs in subsistence-level food, there'll be unreported births... And the ones with the right blood factors and healthy organs will be stashed away by the very rich for transplants as needed.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Jigsaw Man
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and Technology by Larry Niven
Tech news articles related to The Jigsaw Man
Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven
Organlegging-related
news articles:
- Real Organleggers: Human Organ Trafficking
- RFID Tags Proposed To Halt Blackmarket Cadaver Trade
- Donation After Cardiac Death (Wait, I needed that!)
- 10K Illegal Kidneys Transplanted Every Year
- Child Trafficked To Britain By Organleggers
- Heart-In-A-Box Saves Organ For Later
- Islamic State Now Organlegging?
- China Accused Of Harvesting Organs From Unwanted Groups
- Anti-Forced Organ Harvesting Global Summit
| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
| Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light |
| Machete-Wielding Philodendron Isn't Going To Take It Anymore |
| Tsunami Forecasts Improved By Ionosphere Signals |
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