Word: donor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While Harris' project may seem shallow, the idea of choosing an egg donor based on physical characteristics is hardly new. Several egg businesses already let clients select donors by race, weight, height, eye color or hair color, not to mention such preferences as "fine boned" and "tanning ability." Harris isn't the first to charge for eggs either: virtually all egg donors are in fact sellers, at a typical rate of between $3,000 and $5,000 per ovum, plus medical expenses. And an unnamed egg-seeking couple put an ad in several college papers last winter offering...
Long before neuroscientists took the first tentative steps toward brain-tissue transplants (let alone dared to think about whole-brain transplants), mischievous philosophers were plumbing the consequences of such 21st century surgery. "In a brain-transplant operation, is it better to be the donor or the recipient?" these wags asked. To put it another way, if you and Tom manage to swap brains, who is now the real you? The man with your brain attached to Tom's body or the man with Tom's brain joined to your body...
...that it was not an even exchange. "It was clear that my current body and I could part company, but not likely that I could be separated from my brain," he wrote. "The rule of thumb [is] that in a brain-transplant operation, one want[s] to be the donor, not the recipient...
...tend to think that the cells will take their cue from the host that houses them" rather than remembering their past lives like so many cellular Shirley MacLaines. So, in the case of brain-cell implants, it would seem, it is better to be the recipient than the donor...
...sign on donor room walls tells donors that "in case of fire leave room in the same way you entered it." Well, I did leave that room, but not the way I entered it, for I was a new man now: $50 in hand and a huge load off my back...