Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save 2.4M babies

Re:Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save... by Klathmon on Saturday May 12, 2018 @10:29AM (#17054204)

It's an interesting ethics issue.

I'm sure there are people out there who would be more than happy to have their "job" be providing blood or other things like it. And I think it would probably benefit society as a whole for something like it.

But it does seem like it could very VERY easily go south really fast. And there are a lot of ethical issues with it (like a salaried-donator wouldn't be able to do anything to risk the health of that blood at any time, and would it be okay for someone to permanently change their body to better accommodate something like that? What about temporarily change their body?)

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Re:Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save... by ken on Saturday May 12, 2018 @11:28AM (#17054476)

> would it be okay for someone to permanently change their body to better accommodate something like that?

Many professionals in other fields already permanently change their bodies to better suit their profession. I don't see why a full-time Blood Donator would be any different.

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Re:Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save... by firethief on Saturday May 12, 2018 @03:29PM (#17055605)

That's an interesting hypothetical, but there's no way someone could donate blood "full time" to earn a living wage. There's an upper bound to how fast one can produce blood, and a high proportion of people are capable of doing it, so each person can represent at most a miniscule proportion of total supply. It would be like making a career out of football if almost everyone were equally fit and talented and lots of people played all the time for fun and there were no NFL.

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Re:Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save... by Klathmon on Saturday May 12, 2018 @03:44PM (#17055667)

But what if we could we increase the amount of blood someone can donate. I know something roughly similar is done when donating marrow.

What if we could augment humans to be able to produce absurd amounts of blood and make it so it was a full-time job for those people?

If we could increase the amount of blood someone could donate by 100x, would it start to become cheaper to just hire full-time donors rather than deal with all the expenses around donations? And would it be ethical even if the donors we're fully consenting and paid a good salary?

Like you said, its a interesting hypothetical to say the least!

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