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What's your body worth? Try $45 mil

Thursday, July 3, 2003 Posted: 10:38 AM EDT (1438 GMT)
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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- It may be illegal, immoral and certainly ill-advised, but selling every usable part of your body could fetch upward of $45 million, according to a survey in the August issue of Wired magazine.

Even an overweight, out-of-shape body could bring millions when broken down to its valuable fluids, tissues and germ-fighting antibodies.

There is, of course, a major catch: Many of the valuable human body parts are those a person could not live without.

But it does lay to rest the old concept that the human body, when broken down to its basic elements, is only worth pocket change.

Wired Editor-In-Chief Chris Anderson said the price tag gives an idea of the progress of medicine and biology, and shows how much more sophisticated we have become at understanding the complexity of the human body.

"We tried to find some number through which you can quantify the magnitude of the change in technology that we are all experiencing," Anderson said.

The prices, Wired warned, are based on maximum dollar values for some of the most marketable substances, and makes the unlikely assumption that every trace of those substances could be extracted from living tissue for sale.

To avoid issues such as illegal black market trade in organs, the survey was based on projected prices in the United States and did not take into account potential differences in poverty stricken Third World countries.

Due to advances in science and biotechnology, vital organs are no longer the most valuable body parts, the survey demonstrated. That distinction now belongs to bone marrow at $23 million, based on 1,000 grams at $23,000 per gram.

DNA, found in every cell, could fetch $9.7 million at $1.3 million per gram, while extracting antibodies could bring $7.3 million. The accompanying article did point out that the cost of living in a sterile plastic bubble could eat up a lot of the profit from immune system sales.

By comparison, a lung was priced at $116,400, a kidney at $91,400 and a heart was worth a mere $57,000, based on research of cost estimates from hospitals and insurance companies.

On the reproductive front, the survey found a fertile woman could sell 32 egg cells over eight years for a grand total of $224,000. To approach that amount, a man would have to make 12 sperm donations a month for 20 years.