On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
> The short answer is that Niven wrote a whole series of short stories and
> novels around the premise that at some point in the relatively near
> future, most problems with tissue matching and rejection as well as with
> organ storage have been overcome, and with more and more people living
> to older and older ages because they can have organs replaced as they
> fail, at some point the laws are changed to make the official method of
> capital punishment being to be rendered unconscious and then
> disassembled for parts. Then, because the demand for healthy organs
> still far outstrips the supply, more and more crimes are made capital
> offenses. There is also a black market which abducts people on the
> street, murders them, and sells their organs to those who cannot get the
> organs they need from the government-run organ banks. Eventually a
> solution is found in that a method to grow new organs in vitro from cell
> cultures is perfected, bringing an end to the need for filling the organ
> banks by removing organs from other people, and there's a whole novel
> about the changes when that technology finally reaches one of the
> outlying colonies about which I can remember almost everything right now
> except the title . . .
_A Gift from Earth_, IIRC.
I could be wrong, though.
Julia
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