This week, students can donate blood or hair to charity at the blood drive or Locks of Love. These events emphasize how things most of us get for free are valuable and useful to others, such as a pint of blood.
UCLA and the surrounding area offer plenty of opportunities to give away or receive minor compensation for bodily fluids and materials, none of which are related to any sort of organ-selling scandal (that we know of).
Four inches is the minimum donation for Locks of Love ““ practically a trim for most of us ““ and the haircut will be provided by Vidal Sassoon Academy hairstylists.
The hair is used by the nonprofit to make hairpieces for impoverished children suffering from long-term medical hair loss. Recently coiffed donors will also receive a coupon for a free pizookie. One of our columnists has already decided to get his hair cut for the cause.
Giving blood is another worthwhile investment in the greater good. There is always a blood shortage going on. Hospitals like to match blood types exactly, so everyone from universal donors to universal receivers are needed.
And if you don’t know whether you’re actually a type A or not, you’ll get a letter in the mail thanking you for your donation and letting you know that you should “B-positive” (or, in a less hilarious pun, AB-negative or O-positive) about donating from now on.
There are rewards for donating outside of the warm fuzzy feeling and the coma-like nap you can take afterward. You get a free Mann Theatres movie ticket and as many juice boxes and Diddy Riese cookies as you can eat. If you work for ASUCLA, you can receive four paid hours for your (literally) pint-sized loss. In the past, donors have received stuffed animals, messenger bags, water bottles and T-shirts.
San Jose State University recently banned blood drives on its campus. President Don Kassing said the FDA’s guidelines for donating blood interfere with their nondiscrimination policy, specifically how they permanently ban gay men from ever donating blood.
Blood banks such as the Stanford Blood Center are requesting the FDA improve donor questionnaires and have a 12-month deferral for gay men, just like they do with all other at-risk groups.
While we agree the FDA should modernize its decades-old blood donor standards, we think campus blood drives are a good idea. However, we do think they should stop dressing someone up as a gigantic blood drop and make them dance around and pass out fliers on Bruin Walk.
For those of us even more interested in making money for something we don’t use, there’s always DNA.
A tall, blonde, athletically-inclined, college-educated woman with modeling experience could receive $100,000 for a few eggs. To put that in context, every woman is born with one to two million egg-producing follicles, about 400 of which will mature in her lifetime. The average woman will only use 2.3 of them.
But even if you aren’t often described as “like Maria Sharapova and Marie Curie mixed together,” fertility clinics are always seeking eggs from relatively intelligent and disease-free women.
On a related tangent, men can earn money for sperm donation. Unlike a woman’s eggs, sperm is an oft-tapped but limitless resource for males.
Jokes aside, this board urges students to consider donating whatever they can to these worthwhile charities.