This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 1st, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Why is it that we can sell plasma but compensating bone marrow donors is a serious federal crime.

Jeff Rose represents cancer patients seeking potentially life-saving bone marrow hoping to

offer incentives to make more marrow available to the sick.

He's a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. We

spoke following a forum on the issue held January 19th. Although we talk about

bone marrow as something that is transplanted, it's actually much more akin to a blood

transfusion. What's transplanted in quotes in a bone marrow transplant are these special blood producing

marrow cells that live inside the bones. These are just immature blood cells

and most bone marrow donations take place using the same technology

that is used for donating the components of blood like plasma and platelets

and when the donor marrow cells are put into a patient they are transfused into the

patient's arm just like ordinary whole blood. Does the repugnance then have

something to do with the tangible nature of the organ versus blood?

There is an intuition that compensating someone for donating part of their body is repugnant.

And that repugnant's intuition is really just tied to money.

It's not tied to anything else because everybody agrees that donating bone marrow is great and in fact if we

could double or triple or quadruple the number of bone marrow donations that would be

fantastic. This intuition that it's wrong arises only when the donor is compensated somehow and that

intuition just doesn't make sense.

What is the constitutional issue here as opposed to how we think about organs.

The National Organ Transplant Act makes it a crime to compensate a bone marrow donor.

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