How You Know You’re An Entrepreneur
I just saw something in Wired Magazine’s print edition that gives the value of various human parts on the black market. Here are the listed ones:
Cornea (pair): $30,000
Kidney: $62,000-$65,000
Liver: $98,000-$130,000
Heart: $130,000-$160,000
Pancreas: $150,000-$170,000
Complete Cadaver: $200,000
Now your reaction to that may be “gross”. Or it may be shock at the price tags, or the fact that there even is a black market for organs. But if you’re an entrepreneur, your first thought, like mine, was “hey there’s an arbitrage opportunity there.”
A whole cadaver costs $200k. At the low end of the range, split up into the pieces Wired lists you’re looking at $470k. That’s a pretty big ROI for what can’t be more than a couple hours of work for a skilled butcher. Not to mention whatever the unlisted organs fetch. Throw in the extra 100 pounds of bologna you’re left with after that, and you might be talking 3x your money.
May 25, 2010 at 3:55 am
You’re assuming 100% yield from a corpse which I don’t think is realistic. There’s currently no practical way to store organs for much more than a couple of hours so you yield management is a big issue.
May 25, 2010 at 9:39 am
Also, technically the word “arbitrage” is innacurate here. Arbitrage refers to cases when you make money with 0 risk and 0 effort, just passing orders to buy and sell bonds for example.
In this case, you would have to get the cadaver, get the several parts, and then go to all the trouble of finding buyers, with the risk that some organs will be damaged or won’t sell.
So really, it’s a business opportunity, not an arbitrage opportunity.
That being said, it still looks like an interesting opportunity
May 25, 2010 at 3:47 pm
The costs associated with organ removal, storage, and transport are non-trivial. You need to be a physician, specifically a surgeon who specializes in $organ transplant to remove these organs so that they’re still useful for the recipient. It’s not exactly a matter of being a “skilled butcher.”
Just transporting organs is a science in and of itself. This Modern Marvels episode (“Deliver It”) has a pretty good rundown of the science and technology behind it.