Bone marrow drives are a textbook case of raging Scope Insensitivity.
Such campaigns invest tremendous money and effort in testing potential donors for one recipient.
Some Examples,
Luckily, the test results go into a database allowing donors to give to any recipient.
I wouldn't invest the effort to be tested for one person, unless I knew them personally; but I would do so, and did, for any of the thousands who might need it. According to the usual way of thinking, admitting to the first part of that sentence shows that I am callous to the suffering of others.
I think most bone marrow drives are self-aware enough to realize this. I'm sure I've heard the line "even if you can't help X, you may be able to help someone else," and the like enough from this sort of charity.
The recent campaign to find a donor for Amit Gupta also promoted South Asians giving bone marrow in general, due to the difficulty of finding South Asian matches. In some respects it worked against cultural narratives in that community that are afraid or ignorant about the bone marrow transplant process.
This topic is not really related to the things normally discussed here, but I think it's really important, and it might interest Less Wrongers, especially since many of us are interested in ethics and utility calculations that are essentially cost-benefit analyses. Bone marrow donation in the United States is managed by the National Marrow Donor Program. Because typing donors for matching purposes can be costly, they often require people signing up to donate to pay a registration fee, which probably prevents a lot of people from signing up. These costs are being covered until the end of the month by a corporate sponsor, which means that right now, all you need to do if you live in the US is go to http://marrow.org/Join/Join_Now/Join_Now.aspx and fill out a simple questionnaire. You will be sent a kit to collect a cheek swab, and then you will be entered into the donor database. Doing this does not require you to donate if a match comes up.
The reason I think this might interest Less Wrongers is that this is a really cheap way to improve the world. According to their website, about 1 in 500 potential donors are actually asked to donate, so registering doesn't actually make it all that likely that you will be asked to do anything more. If you ARE a match for someone who needs a donation, the cost to you is at most the temporary pain of marrow extraction (many donors are asked only for blood cells), whereas the other person’s chance to live is much improved. This looks like a huge net positive.
Unfortunately I only found out about this a few days ago, and it only occurred to me today that this might be a forum of people who would respond to the argument "you can make the world better at little cost to yourself." However, I ask that you go to the website and spend a few minutes signing up. This is like buying a 1 in 500 lottery ticket that SAVES SOMEONE’S LIFE. If the Singularity hits and an FAI can generate perfectly matched marrow for anyone who needs it from totipotency-induced cells, that will be wonderful, but this is a chance to make sure one more person gets there.