Multivitamins, drugs, gene therapies, human skin, heart, eyeballs, kidneys, entire dead bodies – everything comes with a price tag. Putting aside the moral questions of why and how come that the capitalist market priced even our body parts and health, we asked the question of how much life is worth: what is the maximum that you would/should pay for a life-saving drug?
How high is too high a cost if a drug can save 200-300 babies a year from a debilitating illness or death? And ultimately, does the pricing of new technologies, especially gene therapies, enable to fulfill their promise?
The world is a giant supermarket where you find price tags connected to literally everything. A rare butterfly costs around $200 on eBay, an acre on the surface of the Moon is available for approximately $50 – although there’s no guarantee that you really become the owner of that piece of Moon –, and your organs are also for sale. Not only on the black market.
If you could harvest every organ and chemical in your body, you could make a $45 million. But in reality, Medical Transcription estimates, the average price of a human dead body is more likely to fetch around $550,000 (with a few key body parts driving up the price). If you want to legally sell your heart in the U.S., it can be purchased for about $1 million.
Livers come in second, worth about $557,000 and kidneys cost about $262,000 each. Not to speak about human skin ($10/inch), stomach ($500) and eyeballs ($1,500 each). Unsurprisingly, organs are offered for less on the black market: maybe 10 percent of the above prices – but you never know where those body parts come from.
Still, the black market for organs is flourishing and until technology, e.g. 3D bioprinting, doesn’t offer a viable solution for organ donation, it will remain that way – as there are too many waiting for organ transplantations.
