How about you live up to your handle by not leaving such inappropriate comments? You are disgusting.

sameer is a wonderful human… always helpful and kind and considerate. it’s rare to see some our age instinctively put other people before himself. please, it’s time to help him as much as he’s helped others!

and reena is the funniest and sweetest person i know. i’ve never spent a day with her and not laughed until i cried. i don’t want to image her ever not smiling or laughing!

please spread the word and help them.

I asked this question at the donor drive I went to (which was for Vinay). One of the volunteers, who works for a blood bank, said that normally, it takes 4-6 weeks for a donor’s information to be entered into the database. However, when the samples are collected at a drive organized on behalf of a patient with little time to find a match, they expedite the processing of the sample so that it can be entered in as little as a few days. Don’t know if she was just saying this to make me feel better for registering on behalf of Vinay (whose website now says 11 days left), but I’ll take it on faith.

My cousin recently ordered her kit through the mail and said it was incredibly easy and cheap (free)…not to mention convenient.

razib, i thank you for the reassurance. i don’t know who i’ll end up with, but that’s one more way to placate the ‘rents, just in case i don’t bring IIT boy (who, naturally, belongs to my linguistic community) home. “ma, at least our baby will survive avian flu 5.0.”

you’re exaggerating a bit, but yes, this is an issue. people of thai-european ancestry in the USA who need matches will go to thailand specifically because that combination is more common there (lots of white male expats + thai women). in any case, by the time people who are so genetically mixed appear on the scene in large numbers

1) there will be more of them

2) we will (hopefully) be able to grow organs (fingers crossed)

also, the number of HLA loci are finite, you get your alleles from half of your parents. the immune profile isn’t a mixture, it is a discrete slice of both parents. this means that the increase is diversity isn’t as great as you assume assuming a blending analogy. specifically, the number of genetic loci is small enough that sampling variance is going to make someone deviated from the perfect storm of being 1/4 chettier, 1/4 chinese, 1/4 white and 1/4 african.

in any case, let’s remember the effect of numbers. even if the chance of not matching is 99.995% as you increase the sample space into thousands the expectation of a match within that space increases toward 100%.