In other news, the state of Massachusetts has put forward a bill that would give convicts the opportunity to reduce their sentences by donating organs - essentially, trading body parts for time.
As often happens, science fiction, in the person of author Larry Niven, has already anticipated this macabre concept and its long term implications. Larry Niven's 1967 story The Jigsaw Man, originally published in Harlan Ellison's revolutionary anthology Dangerous Visions*, posits a future in which the organ banks are always hungry, and as such, the slippery slope that starts with prisoners donating bone marrow ends up with even the most trivial legal offenses - in this case, parking tickets - leading to the guilty party being broken down for parts.
Niven uses this concept in a number of stories, including one from The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in which people who have been cryogenically preserved in hopes of a future cure for their ailments are harvested for their organs - "waking up in pieces", as one character describes it.
In his postscript to the story, Niven makes the following comment:
The organ bank problem used to scare me. The internal logic seems so rigid. But if it were that obvious, the Red Cross would have been finding its blood donors on Death Row, five quarts to a donor, since 1940 A.D. That has not been happening. Perhaps I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Maybe it only took someone to point out the advantages. In which case, blame it all on Larry Niven.
Well, Larry, it's good of you to take the blame, but I suspect that Massachusetts came up with this idea all on their own - as might have been expected from a science fiction story, all you had to do was to wait for the future to catch up.
- Sid
* Although, to be honest, if I were Ellison, I wouldn't have put The Jigsaw Man in Dangerous Visions, given the collection's New Wave mandate - it's such a standard Niven story
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