Bring out the corpse!
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world’s premier organ-harvesting
auction! We’ve got our dead body, so let's get started with the bidding!
If we were to take this specimen right here and cut it up with perfect efficiency,
not letting anything go to waste, and selling it all at the top market price we could find,
we would be looking at a cool $45 million. That’s a nice little payday for our auction house,
so let’s hurry up and get started before it all starts to spoil.
Why don’t we kick things off with the fifth most valuable organ in the human body? And
wouldn’t you know it’s actually the largest solid internal organ in the body. That’s internal organ;
we all know that the skin is actually the largest. With four lobes, thirty-two sections,
and thousands of lobules (we just wanted to say that word in a video), it's wobbly;
it’s tasty in a pie but pretty gross when you think about it. It’s the liver!
Do you hate it when you get poisoned? So do we! That’s why you need a brand-new liver.
It’s capable of filtering all manner of harmful toxic substances from your
body. But that’s not all. The liver actually performs over 500 functions in the human body.
If you’ve eaten a ton of sugar and have plenty of excess glucose pumping through your bloodstream,
your liver can grab all that extra glucose and turn it into glycogen. This means that
your body can now store that energy for later. Feeling a bit low on juice later on,
your liver will break that glycogen back down and feed it back to you. How sweet!
Of course, you probably know the liver’s role best from all the people who have
destroyed theirs. Alcohol is not good for the body; it’s actually a low-level poison. So,
while you’re partying and having a great time, your liver is working overtime,
doing its best to keep you alive and healthy. Overwhelm it with too much alcohol in one go,
and your liver can’t keep up, leading to alcohol poisoning. Sustained heavy
drinking over a number of years will steadily destroy your liver, too.
If you have an awful tattoo that you want to be removed - like the one on your neck that was
meant to say “No Regrets”, but was misspelled as “No Ragrets”- you’ve got to get it lasered.
The high-energy laser beam breaks down the ink into tiny fragments, which are then absorbed
into the bloodstream. Where do they end up? Say it with us. One, two, three. The liver!
But you probably didn’t know that this can permanently stain
your liver as not all of the ink is passed from the body.
Thankfully, this body right here has a pristine one! Never a drop of alcohol,
and never been anywhere near a tattoo artist’s needle. Let’s
start the bidding? Can I get a 50? 55? 70? 100? 150? 155? 157?
$157,000! Sold to the tattooed man in the front row! Let’s cut
that sloppy red lump out of our body and give it to him now. Disgusting.
Moving swiftly on from that mess, let’s tear out the fourth most valuable organ. This little fella
may be small, but it accounts for 75% of all organ transplants in the world. That’s some high demand
right there, and luckily for us, each body comes with two. That’s right, folks, it’s the kidneys!
Pumping more than 50 gallons of blood per day - that’s a large bathtub and then some! - much
like the liver, they filter your blood, removing waste and excess chemicals. Been drinking too much
water? Kidneys. Too much uric acid from eating and drinking all day? Kidneys. Too much salt from
playing League of Legends all day? Therapy. But also kidneys. They do regulate your salt levels.
If our cadaver over here was still alive, we could rip one of these bad boys out,
and they’d still live a happy and healthy life with the right treatments.
Maybe a good side hustle for a bit of income instead of starting a podcast.
Rip the second one out, and they’d develop uremia. Toxins steadily build up in the bloodstream,
which are no longer being removed from the body and expelled as urine. It could take a few days,
it could take a few weeks, but they would lose their appetite, sleep most of the day,
suffer from severe confusion, change skin color, and even have visions of people who aren’t there.
The body slowly poisons itself from the inside,
and they die. So it’s a good thing our dead guy is already dead!
The reason why everyone loves kidneys so much is because they help with some
of the most prevalent health conditions in the world. Diabetes, high blood pressure,
and heart problems can all be exacerbated by poorly functioning kidneys. Slap one of
these shiny new ones in there, and you could have a whole new lease of life!
Just make sure your body doesn’t reject it, or you’ll be clinging to a dialysis machine for
dear life as your immune system does its best to destroy your new organ. But don’t worry,
only a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people experience organ rejection with
kidneys. Only 10-15% in the first year, you’ll be fine!
We know it’s higher than the liver,
so who wants to start bidding at 157? Can I get a 170? 185? 195? An even 200?
Sold for $200,000 to the woman in the League of Legends t-shirt in the third row!
With all items in this auction, their price can vary wildly depending on the quality you
are buying, and for our next organ, that is especially true. If you’re a smoker,
bad luck your set of these will only go for $40,000. That’s right,
we’re talking about everyone’s favorite air sacks: the lungs!
Which lung is your favorite? The left or the right? Do you think it’s a trick
question because they’re both the same? You’re wrong! The left lung is actually
smaller because it needs to make space for the heart. It also only has two lobes,
while the right lung has three. But we’re selling both as a set, so there's no need to take sides!
You think one and a bit bathfuls of blood was a lot? how does a concrete
mixing truck sound? The volume in the mixer, about 11,000 liters,
is how much air you cycle through your lungs in a day. Think that doesn’t sound like much; that’s 13
pints per minute. And much like the kidneys, you can survive with just one of these guys.
We’d pick the right one personally, but it’s totally your choice.
We won’t flatten this pair out right here, but if you did, opening up all of the individual sacs (or
alveoli) and stretching them flat, they would be the same size as a tennis court. Throw them in a
tank of water and they’ll float, the only organ in your body that would. It's safe to say you’ll
want a good pair of these in your chest when you hit the pool, or you’ll sink like a stone.
And you’ll want some of these if you’re spending a lot of time in the pool because they’re key to
losing weight. When your body fat breaks down to release energy, it releases two main waste
products. One is water, which your body expels as sweat or urine, but the other is carbon dioxide,
which, of course, you breathe out. But what’s really crazy is the ratio.
You’d think most of the weight would be lost through water, but roughly 84% of it comes out
through your breath! But it’s not just your fat that you breathe out. Every carbohydrate
that you consume is broken down into water and CO2; it’s even the same with alcohol.
Your lungs are a really efficient way for your body to remove waste products from your body.
So next time someone stands a bit too close, and you catch a whiff of their bad breath,
just remember it’s not only stale coffee; it’s also fat, last night’s beer,
and the slightly undercooked chicken breast they decided to risk it with last night. Much better.
Who’s starting the bidding on this one? Do I see 210 anywhere? 210? Can I get a 230? 250? 260? 270?
SOLD for $272,000. It looks like a couple won the bid,
so feel free to squabble over which lung you’d each prefer!
We’re into the top two items of the night, ladies and gentlemen,
and our corpse is smelling less and less fresh by the minute. Let’s get things wrapped up ASAP!
Our runner-up highest ticket item is up there because of just how tricky it is to
remove and place into a new body. It’s a rare one in the organ donation world, and as such,
we’re charging a real premium for this one. It's not the sexiest of organs,
but worth its weight in gold; it’s the intestines! Bet you didn’t see that coming.
These brown snake tunnels are up there as one of the hardest transplants a
surgeon can perform. 1959 saw the first successful small intestine transplant,
but it was only in a small dog. It wasn’t until 1988 that the first
successful transplant was done on a human. Rejection rates were through the roof,
as well as a really high risk of infection. The breakthrough came from a leap forward in
immunosuppressant drugs when ciclosporin came onto the scene in 1972. These drugs help to
stop the body’s immune system from seeing the new organ as ‘alien’ and dull their defense response.
Another better drug called tacrolimus then made this surgery a viable option as opposed to an
experimental procedure, but even to this day, intestinal transplants are difficult.
So what’s so special about these big guys?
Well, if you’re Leonardo DaVinci, you’re probably thinking that they help with breathing. But you’re
wrong, Leo. To everyone else, you probably rightly know them as being the exit stages
of the digestive system. They squeeze and massage the food mush through themselves with a wavelike
motion known as peristalsis. All along the walls of the small intestines are little finger-like
structures that sift through that mush - gross, right? They’re called villi, but if you zoom in
close, you’ll see that those fingers have got their own fingers called microvilli.
And if you zoom in on them…! Just kidding, it only goes down to microvilli.
These little fingers look through all of the food and reabsorb useful things from it. Water,
nutrients, vitamins, and even good bacteria. But they have a strict zero-tolerance policy
for bad bacteria and anything harmful. Like your kidneys, they also help balance out
your salt and water levels. If you have too much water in your body, your intestines will
secrete some of it into your feces. Not enough and they’ll absorb some of it, same with salt.
So what happens if they stop working? Well, you’re in big trouble. They hold a huge amount
of waste products relative to the rest of your body. If something isn’t good for you,
it often winds up in your intestines, ready to be… released. That means there is a
large concentration of harmful bacteria lurking around. If you get a cut inside your intestines,
it runs a high risk of getting infected. And given that they’re all curled up and
knotted deep inside your body, they’re not exactly easy to get to and treat.
If your intestines get infected and shut down, you’ll need to go straight onto total parenteral
nutrition (TPN) where all of your nutrients are fed straight into your blood supply,
cutting out the middleman of your digestive system. But, of course, that middleman is
there for a reason. To perform TPN, you need to find a very large vein. There are only six
veins big enough in the body. The worst part? Each vein will steadily be damaged over time,
so you have to switch. Once you use up the last available vein, you’re out of luck.
So you need some new intestines? Well, this is where it gets tricky. They need to be
transplanted almost immediately after the death of the donor. Leave them for even a few hours,
and they’re no longer viable. The best that can be done is cooling them,
but this will only extend their lifespan to about 5 hours, after which they’ll be unusable.
So I hope you understand, ladies and gentlemen, that these bits of tubing are coming at a real
premium. Probably would have made sense to sell them off first, but then we’d have to
restructure the whole auction, and you’d lose the anticipation of finding out their price!
With that in mind, let’s do a quick round of bidding here. How about a cool $800k? We know,
we know, it’s a big markup from the previous few, but there are logistics to consider here,
people! And it looks like we’re sold to the gentleman in the… (sniffs)... oh,
smells like they might have already gone off. Too bad, no refunds, I’m afraid.
This brings us to our most important and pricey organ of the night, but just before we set the
price, we’ve been hearing a few grumbles from the audience here about our pricing model,
so we wanted to explain a little! The black market is not only very fickle,
but it’s also incredibly secretive for obvious reasons. You can’t just search
for how much X organ goes for on eBay and expect to find an answer!
Well, actually, maybe you can. In 2013, in the state of Indiana, a man was arrested
for selling jars of real-life human brains on eBay. He had 60 brains total and was selling
sets of 6 for just $600 (plus shipping), so if anyone’s looking for a bargain tonight, you can
find him out back. Not really. He was arrested at a Dairy Queen. For those morbidly curious,
no, he wasn’t harvesting the brains himself, he was swiping the jars from a museum! In contrast,
the most expensive brain in the world was likely to be Albert Einstein’s as 46
slides of it were sold to the Mütter Museum for probably a good deal more than that.
So, what is our point here? Prices vary wildly. Peter Scharf, a German filmmaker,
met a couple of men in a Moldovan village who had sold their kidneys. Earlier,
we told you that kidneys can go for $200,000. These men were each paid just $2,292 for theirs.
On the black market, middlemen take enormous profits, often
harvesting organs from people in extreme poverty or victims of human trafficking,
sometimes without consent. The crimes they commit are complex, and the risks are huge,
and as a result, their prices surge massively. Seventeen people die each day while waiting for
organs. A new person is added to the waiting list every 9 minutes, and yet only 3 in every
1,000 people who die are in a position to actually have their organs harvested.
The reason the black market exists is that the supply of organs has always fallen well short
of the demand, and when your life is on the line, you get desperate. One in ten organ transplants
performed are done through the black market. It is an enterprise worth over $1 billion annually,
with 10,000 kidney transplants a year. How do you fancy your chances of rejecting one of those?
Back to the auction and our big ticket organ. It’s a crowd favorite, and we had a feeling if
you all left tonight without hearing it mentioned at least once, you’d be a little dis-heartened.
Here it is, in all its pulsating glory! The center of the human body:
The Heart. What’s the number one killer in the US? That’s right, heart disease.
And before the rest of the world gets too smug, it’s not just the US. Before COVID-19,
heart disease had been the leading cause of death globally for 30 years straight.
Every 1.5 seconds, somebody dies from heart disease. That’s one in
three deaths globally each year. The worst part? It’s been rising and is predicted to
continue to rise. Sedentary lifestyles, ultra-processed diets, high cholesterol,
and all of the trappings of 21st-century office life in
the developed world contribute to this number getting steadily bigger and bigger.
I can see it in your eyes. Everyone in this room is hungry for it. You all want a new heart,
don’t you? The surgery isn’t easy, either. We fit a pump that will temporarily take
over the job of your heart and lungs while we stop your heart and replace it, or we do
an off-pump procedure and just go straight in trying to replace it while it’s still beating.
You’re all desperate for one. Your sick old hearts are hammering out of
your chests! Can I get $1 million? 1.2? 1.4? 1.5?
Sold for $1.6 million dollars! That’s the standard going rate for a heart transplant
in the United States of America. If you want the most expensive organ in the world; that’s
where you’ll find it. But rest assured, we’re running a nice off-the-books kind of operation
out here. And this is the organ on the black market where you’ll find the heftiest discount.
Tell you what, I’ll let you all fight over this one. Whoever’s left standing
at the end gets first dibs on harvesting any of the bodies. Let the games… begin!
Now check out “How Much Is An Entire Human Body Worth?” Or watch this video instead!