Organ Futures

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I do hope that you, like me, carry an organ donor card. So many older people don't, thinking that their parts are worn out and would therefore be of no use to anyone in the event that they were involved in an accident and had no further use for them.

Nothing could be further from the truth. One's organs, blood cells, bones and so forth all have a value, if a rather variable one.

How else is a medical student, with a bright future in transplantation, to learn the difference between a fresh young liver and the fatty, degenerate one of the life-long boozer without feeling it for himself while it is still comparatively fresh?

The bones of older people can be cut into slices to show young people the elegant latticeworkof osteoporosis and their blood can be analysed by the budding haematologist as the crowning glory of a lifetime's resistance to viral attack in the manner of a very rare and ancient claret. One never knows what the medical research comunity will find of value and the more they can use the less there is to cremate saving both the environment and any drain on one's estate.

So it was with some excitement that the Ink-Jet Widows Investment Club received a presentation last week from a group of young scientists from the Centre for Comparative Apoptosis and Bioinformatics at the Babraham Institute. They have a novel concept for adding a little investment frisson to the developing market for human tissue.

In a nutshell, you donate your entire body to their 'harvesting company' for a certain lump sum up front. Their logo is painlessly, but irremoveably, tattoed onto your rear panty-line area and, using a patented system of injected chemical dyes, your major organs are then discretely barcoded. Accident and Emergency units will be issued with barcode readers and will be paid a commission when they report the presence of a harvestee to the company.

The clever part is that each of the elements of your body is then traded on a new futures market and your net biological worth becomes a dynamic figure depending on component demand at that time. At the point of death, they will freeze your value at the market rate and pay fifty percent of the increment since signing into your estate.

Now, a single person is still not worth very much on his or her own, but many of them can be aggregated, by biologial type, into special investment vehicles for the larger punter - rather like individual units in a unit trust. So it came as no surprise to us that our scientists have already generated much interest amongst the larger banks. Celebrity harvestees will, of course, be traded individually and attract a higher up-front payment.

They have wisely appointed my old friend Professor ffrench-Mosterd, the Cytomegalo Corporation Professor of Senescence and Cell Death at the Institute as their Chairman, so they have a safe pair of hands as well as a highly innovative group of young thinkers.

We have made a small seed investment, as it were, and are going as a gaggle to the tattoo parlour on Wednesday.