On a cross-country drive with nothing to occupy my time but fuzzy AM radio and a pocket cassette recorder, I came up with the following questions: (1) In McDonald’s commercials, I can figure out that Mayor McCheese is a cheeseburger and Hamburglar is a hamburger. But what the hell is Grimace? (2) What organs can you live without, if you really had to? How much could I sell them for? –Nep Smith, Los Angeles
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(1) According to McDonald’s spokesperson Jane Hulbert, Grimace is a “big fuzzy purple fellow.” You figured this out for yourself, you say. What you want is detail. Too bad. Here’s the complete McDonald’s personnel file on the guy: “Grimace personifies the child in everyone…. He is Ronald [McDonald]’s special pal. Everyone loves Grimace because of his innocent loving nature. He occasionally causes trouble in McDonaldland because he is clumsy, but his friends overlook this because he is so happy.”
(2) OK, back to selling unneeded parts of your body. Cecil has a book addressing precisely this possibility called Sell Yourself to Science, published a while back by Loompanics, the same folks who brought you 101 Sucker Punches and The Complete Book of International Smuggling. Author Jim Hogshire regretfully informs us that it’s against the law in the U.S. and most other countries to pay money for spare body parts. But he claims there’s an overseas black market for used organs, and in India the organ trade apparently is perfectly legal, according to the wire-service (meaning not totally flaky) clippings the Loompanics folks sent me. According to Hogshire, in addition to renewable resources such as blood, milk, sperm, etc, the stuff you can spare that somebody else theoretically could use includes kidneys, bone marrow, liver slices, the odd bit of lung, and corneas. But he’s stretching matters a bit. While live-donor kidney and bone-marrow transplants are common, live-donor liver transplants are still experimental and live-donor lung transplants are pretty much unheard of. As for live-donor corneal transplants–come on, would you go blind for a buck? Hogshire claims folks in India do, for $4,000 per cornea, but one suspects an element of urban legendry here. The rate in Madras for kidneys is more reliably reported as $500 to $1,000 per. (Hogshire cites kidney rates of $10,000 and up, but that’s the all-in price paid by the transplantee, not what the donor gets.) Not much for a highly useful, custom-built pound of flesh. Hogshire tacitly admits as much; he spends a bigger chunk of the book telling you how to become a paid human guinea pig for medical researchers. If that’s no go, he notes, you can always avail yourself of the grim but perfectly legal practice of leasing your body in toto to a large corporation on a per-hour basis. Translation: get a job.
