7 ms·

Amit Gupta Could Have Marrow Transplant by End of Year

• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• suivix 15y ago
  Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.? "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
  • SandB0x 15y ago
    Ignoring your horrific lack of tact and sensitivity: From http://amitgupta.com/ http://amitgupta.com/ > In the past... I started Jelly, worked with Seth Godin to start ChangeThis, brought BarCamp to NYC, started a co-op called House 2.0, contributed to a WSJ best-seller with Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki and others, and started a venture-backed company called The Daily Jolt while in college. I enjoy camping.
    • ineedtosleep 15y ago
      He actually brings a point I've been wondering since the entire thing started: Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list? Downvote me to oblivion if necessary, but this really is a genuine question which, by the looks of things, has the answer of: His life is more important than everyone else on the transplant list.
      • _delirium 15y ago
        Ingroup + prominence I'd guess, as in many communities. For example, if a well-known punk-rock guitarist had a similar issue, he'd probably get similar exposure in that community (more than someone not from that community, and more than a "mere" fan who wasn't a prominent guitarist).
      • SandB0x 15y ago
        > Downvote me to oblivion if necessary Don't do this. Please read: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ("Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.") To answer your question, nobody is suggesting his life is more important. In fact, as is mentioned towards the end of the article, by getting more people registered through this relatively high profile campaign he is increasing the chances of finding a match for others in need of a bone marrow transplant.
      • synnik 15y ago
        When I first saw his headlines a while back, I had the same question... But there is a very reasonable answer - he is bringing to light a gap in the availability of bone marrow for his particular ethnicity. It is not that he is personally more important than anyone else... it is that he, and others like him, are under-served. Using his connections to raise this issue not only helps him, but should help anyone in his same situation.
      • goatcurious 15y ago
        his life is as important as any other - however, he has done an invaluable service to the entire south asian community by taking on the issue of bringing more to the bone marrow registry. From any account, the campaign has been a revelation. He deserves to find a match, and live many more terrific years. So do others. But I'll be extra happy if he does too.
      • ineedtosleep 15y ago
        In reply to _delirium: Right. I guess the thing that bothers me about the entire thing is that this is done at such a bigger scale than other similar requests, especially from the past. Requesting help from a small group, like family is one thing, but requesting help from the internet doesn't settle right for some reason.
        • jstn 15y ago
          If you were facing death and your best hope at survival was crowdsourcing help on the internet you'd... what, politely decline to bother anyone in the internet community you've been a major part of? Skip the chance to raise awareness for something that could save the lives of many others besides yourself? Die alone knowing you saved someone half a second reading an HN headline that wasn't directly relevant to them?
        • mikeash 15y ago
          The help they requested will go to help an entire ethnic group of people, not just one person. This effectively a massive charity operation using an individual story as a hook. I don't understand how anyone could possibly criticize this as being selfish.
      • sbashyal 15y ago
        There are a couple of reasons this case is different in a way relevant to HN community: 1. Amit's friends have been using current technology to campaign for the cause (e.g.: https://twitter.com https://twitter.com /#!/search?q=%23ISwabbedForAmit) and this news proves the success of the campaign 2. Amit himself is a Hacker. He is one of us! Many people die each year, we don't discuss all of them like we discussed Steve Jobs. 3. He is helping build the database for future transplants
      • oz 15y ago
        "Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?" He is not more important in an objective sense. Most people would agree in an abstract sense that all lives are equally valuable, but would readily save their child rather than another if it came down to it. Why? Because they value the life of their child more than the life of another's child, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Amit, as a member of the startup community, is our child, as it were. Due to this commonality, we feel closer to him than 'faceless' people on the list. So your last sentence might read: "His life is more important than everyone else on the transplant list to us."
        • daenz 15y ago
          Anyone else see the irony of a community fighting to save a person's life, while ignoring all the other "faceless" sufferers, when the life that they're fighting for probably depends on the good will of a "faceless", anonymous person? Serious question.
          • nyellin 15y ago
            By getting tested you increase the chances that everyone finds a match, not just Amit.
          • homosaur 15y ago
            I'm not sure you know what "irony" means.
            • deleted 15y ago
              [deleted]
            • deleted 15y ago
              [deleted]
            • daenz 15y ago
              Sad time when HN doesn't downvote your non-contributing comment out of spite for my comment.
          • 15y ago
      • tlrobinson 15y ago
        In addition to the other answers, raising awareness and getting people to sign up to be bone marrow donors can potentially help a lot more people than just Amit.
      • blhack 15y ago
        He isn't, it just so happens that he is a member of our community. I'd bet that your friends, family, and coworkers take a bit of an interest in your personal life. Amit's friends and coworkers just happen to be a very very large group.
      • bermanoid 15y ago
        Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list? Does it matter? His situation is bringing attention to this, and getting more people to add themselves to the registry. Whether or not he is personally saved, it's likely that several other matches will be made as a result, so I'd say it's a good thing overall. By my understanding, this isn't a matter of supply and demand, or him trying to "jump the line" by making a direct appeal to people - it's a matter of sheer volume, it's relatively difficult to find donors for anyone that match well, so having more people in the system is a good thing for everyone.
  • OoTheNigerian 15y ago
    Instead of down-voting, people should explain. "Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.?" I see it this way: He is a part of the start up community to which we belong to. If something affects one of us, we should try to help. We do not live in a vacuum where only code and startups are important and not the people who help make them.
  • chunkyslink 15y ago
    I hope you are never in the situation where you need help. There could be a chance that someone from this community can have their life saved and you want to complain about it. Just skip over the link if you dont want to read it. WTF. Its not hard.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • tdoggette 15y ago
    Amit Gupta's influence on bone marrow registration will uncertainly save several lives over the next decades. The role of technology and the associated community is an important part of that story. It's certainly one of the factors in my decision to sign up with the registry. [http://marrow.org http://marrow.org could use the touch of a UX designer, but the signup process is straightforward enough.]
  • jamesaguilar 15y ago
    Unless you think all the people upvoting don't fall into the good hackers category (and how could you know that if you did think so), that it is so highly upvoted should give you a clue.
  • noonespecial 15y ago
    He's in our Monkeysphere. http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
  • nitrogen 15y ago
    FWIW: It looks like this post got your account auto-killed.
• callmevlad 15y ago
  "But we’re sort of in wait-and-pray mode because historically, only half of South Asians who are tested actually agree to donate." Not only is the chance of finding South Asians to get a DNA test very low, but that chance is further sliced by half because a matched donor can get cold feet. I really hope that those people who were identified as a match come through for Amit (or others in need).
  • tdoggette 15y ago
    Look, if you sign up, you sign up to actually give marrow if there's a match. Period. Unless you're not healthy enough, there's no excuse for welching on a deal that involves someone's life.
    • naz 15y ago
      How wrong it is to flake is irrelevant. You can't really force someone to undergo surgery.
      • leddt 15y ago
        It's basically a 6 hours long blood donation. Hardly what most people think as surgery. I agree you can't force them to go through with it, but the effort needed versus the outcome if successful are not even comparable.
        • preamble 15y ago
          No it's not like a blood donation. It's misinformation like this that cause people to sign up to donate, and then back out when they find out what they really have to do. Bone marrow donation is a surgery. PBSC donation requires you to get injected with a drug for 5 days, and then have your blood drawn out from one arm, go through a machine, and passed back to you through the other arm. If you have thin veins it'll even require a central line (tube in your neck).
          • maxharris 15y ago
• patio11 15y ago
  You guys may be interested in Flynn vs. Holder, which is a court case attempting to strike down the federal prohibition on selling bone marrow. If you could buy and sell bone marrow, all parties agree that that would happen more frequently than bone marrow donation. The side that believes that would be bad won. (A brief sketch of the concern: if you allow money into the equation, either a) people who won the marrow lottery could extort money from folks who are dying or b) poor people would be hooked up to machines and have their vital juices sucked out so that rich people could live. A brief sketch of the argument for allowing bone marrow sales: the present law guarantees persistent market undersupply of bone marrow, which, with certainty, kills people.)
  • learc83 15y ago
    The only way to tell what will happen is to run a trial. That way we can stop conjecturing, and see what actually happens. My guess is it would work pretty well.
  • blhack 15y ago
    <For reference: I'm not making claim one way or another here, just presenting an argument. This doesn't reflect my personal view, I'm just trying to explain the logic behind disallowing people to sell their organs> It's a moral minefield. When people get desperate for money, they're willing to do things that they might later regret. This is why things like loan sharks tend to be illegal (and why, one could argue, auto title loans and the like should be as well. In that case it's a matter of collective versus individual intelligence. Collectively, an auto title loan service is far more intelligent than an individual, and they are thus able to be predatory in their lending practices [to great success]). I'm not equating selling your organs with loan sharking, but I believe it illustrates my point. (Donating your organs to get yourself out of extreme financial hardship could be considered a form of duress. This is one of the classic arguments against prostitution.)
  • maxharris 15y ago
    As you've pointed out, the alternative for those who need these cells (but can't get them) is death. I agree completely. But the argument for the other side isn't sound. Poor people (with the right haplotype at the right time) could become quite rich if we don't try to interfere with bone marrow sales. Do you know what I'd pay for cells that would save my life if I needed them? Quite a lot more than I paid for my car.
• kens 15y ago
  One interesting thing about Amit Gupta's efforts to get people to register their bone marrow is he's actually helping other people much more than he's helping himself. The key point is that everyone who needs bone marrow is more likely to find a match because of the additional registrants. Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? It's kind of the opposite of tragedy of the commons or free-rider. Amit's actions actually seems structurally similar to contributing to open-source software: he's trying to solve his own problem, but at the same time helping thousands of other people. In any case, you should sign up - wouldn't it be great to save someone's life in this way?
  • yogrish 15y ago
    Yes Amit is in a way helping people who are getting registered. So guys, pls help Amit. Btw, Nice parallel drawn.
  • gajomi 15y ago
    >Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this? From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearly-neutrally fit cooperator". In public goods games cooperators increase the amount of public goods available to everyone, but if there is some cost to producing the good they can be subject to invasion by defectors. Amit's campaign definitely benefits everyone in the community more or less equally, but the cost to him (determined by the additional opportunities he might have had to find a donor for himself through some other means) are presumably quite low to the point where we can consider them to be zero. Since both cooperators and defectors pay nothing but receive the same benefit, they are equally fit and no relative fraction of strategies employed by the population is preferred (although having more cooperators should contribute to a higher overall payoff). The interesting little twist to the story, if we are thinking in terms of evolutionary game theory, is that players that reach a certain payoff (e.g., by getting there transplant), leave the game with some probability! This is the opposite of what usually happens in games in evolutionary biology, since higher absolute payoff is typically associated with larger population sizes.
  • atakan_gurkan 15y ago
    Not a game-theoretic name, but in evolutionary theory such behaviours with similar outcomes are called "kin selection" or "group selection". IMHO, the former is more on the point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
• herbdean 15y ago
  Mike makes a good comment - The one thing that the article does not explain is that all swabs go into a national database. If you give a sample in a drive to save somebody that you know, you could end up getting a call 10 years later saying that you match somebody else on the other side of the country