Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I went [to the top of] Vehicle Assembly Building and looked down, and tears burst from my eyes. The size of this cathedral where the Rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| 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. |
| 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.
In Anne McCaffrey's 1990 novel Pegasus in Flight, street children are stockpiled for later use as organ donors:
Until we have the right to use infertility drigs 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.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Jigsaw Man
More Ideas
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
| 'Cortical Modem' Latest On DARPA's Wishlist |
| Sea Slug Feeds On Sunlight With Genes From Its Food |
| Forget Longevity, How About Super-Intelligence? |
| The Bioengineered Uterus |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'The new species. Evolution. The race to come after man.'
'When you buy one of them, you don't need to tie up to an electric outlet.'
'Solved the problem to some extent by devising rigid metallic clothing...'
'The robot drew his cab up before Eric's modest six-room bungalow.'
'Hello, Europa... Is this your robot I'm looking at, in sector 94?'
