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Ending Organ Donor Shortages?
Tracy2112 writes "An interesting and recurring science fiction theme is the idea of black-market traffic in human body parts -- as Larry Niven termed it, "organlegging". According to this USA Today's Op-Ed piece on Yahoo, we're getting closer . . . including
LifeSharers.com, , an organization working to sign up "preferred donors" who agree to preferentially donate to other LifeSharer members. Is this a great way to reward people for being generous with their unused body parts -- or a scary flashback to how early 'subscription-only' fire departments worked?"
Part of the problem is caused by dead people whose families don't allow the deceased's organs to be harvested, even if that person had given full legal consent for doctors to do so when they died. That does not make sense. If families have to follow the last will and testament of dead people, why is this an exception? Wouldn't these familie would be aware of this and wouldn't want to disrespect the wishes of their dead?
Bash script for FP whores
The way to encourage organ donation is to make the the default option on your driver's license instead of something you have to request. In addition, doctors shouldn't have to get permission from the family if the deceased already has an organ donor card.
Im sorry. We waste way too much time energy and money prolonging the lives of halfdead people.
So if a group wants to make it easier for THEM to prolong their lives, who cares. But noone should complain. The fire analogy is wrong. General safety in a society should be encouraged and given to the society as a whole. Artificial extension of life isn't a needed function and has little intrinsic benefits.
If there's a market for organs, and criminals sentenced to the death penalty are required to donate them, you now have an industry that profits from having more capital punishment. They might then lobby the government to expand the death penalty for the same reason a defense contractor might lobby for military expansion or a private prison industry might oppose legalizing marijuana. Scary thought.
That said, death row inmates should be allowed to donate organs if they choose to. I just don't want it to be in some corporation's financial interest to expand the death penalty.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Negative option is immoral, and does not communicate consent. Your example would make default consent to being an organ donor mandatory for anyone who wishes to legally drive.
I don't want the record clubs in the human organ harvesting business, thank you very much.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Part of the problem is that you can be officially considered dead, if you are a organ donor, or not dead if you aren't. Despite what the organ donor perponents say, you really aren't as safe if you are a donor. I know someone who died "on the table" and came back, she is not a donor, but if she was, she wouldn't be alive today.
The hard part about organ donations, is the organs need to be taken out very soon after a death, and sometimes it's too soon.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Wait until YOU are the one who needs an organ transplant... I hope you never need, but think about it.
We all need to come to terms with our inevitable death. Medicine is nice when it can give us a few more years of good life, but we shouldn't come to expect it.
The problem with this is that the less scrupulous would simple harvest other's organs and sell them. Suddenly the stories about some guy waking up in a tub of ice with a sore back won't be jokes.
I believe death penalty executions ought to be on national television because it is far too easy to say, "let him fry" in this country without having to really face the consquences - kind of like how I also believe no member of congress should be allowed to vote for going to war unless they have a child in the military or are themselves in the reserves and no waivers for those reservists either.
But, I don't think there should be any ads during the proceedings because it would cheapen the situation, although it would probably get more people to tune in.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
not including my right not to have to pay more taxes to support increased medical expenses from those idiots
You're right, you shouldn't have to pay for the medical bills of anyone else. When laws get passed that force people to pay for other people's mistakes, such as socialized health care, medicare, and medicaid, it turns the government into everyone's nanny, dictating how we should behave at every turn.
We need to get rid of the socialist stuff, and then everyone is free to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I can't believe organ donation is even optional. Families can bite it -- the fact is, healthy organs are always in short supply, and people NEED them. There's a time to let personal preference and religious belief rule, and there's a time when the needs of the state overrule them. Personally, I'm a registered organ donor. Hell, my mother is donating anything that is isn't salvaged for sickies to medical schools for dissection.
Because hospitals are too afraid of being sued by the families if they take the organs anyway. Personally, I think it's disgusting that a family would ignore a person's request like that, and that our legal system is screwed up enough that a lawsuit would probably prevail in such a case...
How about this:
If you want to be eligible to receive transplanted organs should you ever need them, you must be a registered organ donor.
Otherwise, too bad.
This way, you encourage people to register as organ donors (as I have, for example) *and* you cut down on the leeches. If someone has a religious or other dumbass objection to donating organs, then how is it fair for them to be able to receive them while other people who are willing to contribute to the system die on waiting lists?
It's just like any peer-to-peer filesharing system: if you want to download, you really have to share for the system to work.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Naturally, that rule would also apply to those who don't sign up for organ replacement, right? Can't accept a part unless you're also willing to give a part.
In essence, that rule would make it an incentive to sign-up for organ donation. Otherwise, when you need a body part, you don't qualify.
This program rewards those who share with a higher chance of gaining organs in the statistically unlikely event for the need arising. It's not that much of a stretch in comparing this with the Free Software movement.
If you intend on keeping your parts proprietary (not sharing when someone needs it, and you no longer do since you've passed on), you aren't allowed to take from this source.
If the rule about receiving parts only if you're also on a donor list is made mandatory, the shortage may not be that severe or even exist. The more people who join the better this works.
= 9J =
Donating a kidney will mean a difficult operation (with all the risks that entails), an extensive recovery time (more so that for the recipient), an increased risk of kidney failure for the donor coupled with a significantly reduced lifespan, all for a relatively slight extension to the recipients life. (Figures are out there but I don't know them - I'd like to see something greater than a 3 year post operation survival rate).
And after all this, there is still a high rate of organ rejection - 50 percent of patients have faced rejection episodes within the first year.
Other than getting off dialysis, the benefits for the patient include:
(1)Increased feeling of well-being
(2)Fewer restrictions on diet and activities
(3)Increased energy level
To my mind, I would expect something more - hell you're donating an *organ* here!
I could understand a family member doing it, but I think that donating a kidney to someone you don't even know is something that *you* may learn to regret.
My wife is taiwanese and still has relatives on the mainland.
We visited the mainland in January and I met her cousin who is an organ transplant surgeon. He spoke openly about how in China you can can examine a catalog of potential donors on death row with blood and tissue work already done. If you find a match you can designate ahead of time who will donate the body part that you need. When that persons time is up the surgeons are waiting to harvest.
The surgeon said he couldn't drink that night because he had surgery the next day. He joked how you wouldn't be able to do that in the US, ie schedule your transplant surgeries in advance. Many executions are done around the new year as a sort of cleansing/celebration/unrest quelling. The surgeon said that was a very busy time for him. I asked him whether they still bill the prisoners family for the bullet - they do. Strange when the body parts are worth much more than the bullet huh?
Given all that I bet if you are VIP in China and deathly ill that the execution of "your" prisoner might be pushed up?
One last thing people may not know that mitigates some of this. There are no voluntary donors. Everyone in China wants to be buried whole. It is VERY important to them. I joked that the world should adopt a system where only people who are willing to donate should receive organs because not every country allowed what China did.
My wife made a funny face and then translated. To the mainlanders at the dinner THAT was a funny idea. Why not use the prisoners that are full of shame and have hurt society?
When I got my license, I made a point of ensuring I was marked as an organ donor. I can understand that some people have religions preventing it, or otherwise oppose the idea for one reason or another, but...
If you're not against it for any reason, you really ought to check it off. If you're against it, that's fine. But I know a lot of people who don't have a reason for not doing it, it was just too much work to check the box off or something?
Pesonally, I'd rather know that when I die, I (indirectly) save someone else's life. (And as someone once joked: "Remember, they're not taking your organs. They're keeping them alive for you.") If you don't have a problem saving a life after you die through organ donation, please consider making sure you indicate such next time you renew your license.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The only problem with this is people who can't register as donors, like people with communicable diseases, etc. Otherwise, it's an awesome idea.
You would be surprised at the ratings and the number of viewers such live executions would attract. I can guarantee you that deep down, most people are savages, with a thin layer of civilization on top. Executions used to be public, and they were quite an entertainment, attracting huge crowds and lots of sideshows and festivities, it was almost a modern day carnival. More people than you'd care to admit would gladly and ghoulishly gape at such a spectacle, and the gorier, the better.
That's one way of looking at it. You could also have explained such human behaviour as natural curiosity. The same curiosity that drives explorers, archaeologists, engineers and scientists to discover our world, our history, new technology and so much more. Personally, I like to watch shows like CSI that teach me about many aspects of forensic evidence gathering, including autopsies. You may find that savage, but if humans would lack those interests, we could never have surpassed savage lifestyle. How can we learn about new phenomena if we are not fascinated by them?
If you want a reference just take a look at the typical crowds that gather at every minor or major disaster, trying to get a good view of the 'action' and in the meantime hindering the rescue workers.
And how do you characterize people who assist the wounded shortly after an accident? The behaviour you detest (flocking towards a disaster) is laudable when there are no rescue workers (which was true during most of human history). Besides, most people happily stay out of the way of rescue workers if they know what to do. Not knowing might be called stupid or misinformed, but certainly not vile.
People are scum and don't you forget it.
No, you interpret certain behaviour in the worst possible way. Judging mankind as inherently evil shows lack of understanding on your part. You fail to understand that bad behaviour is caused by mechanisms which were/are necessary for human survival. For instance, violent tendencies are inherent to humans and are the basis of terrible crimes. One might want to argue that mankind is despicable because we have these violent tendencies. However, if we were unable to use violence, we could not defend ourselves (see "A Clockwork Orange").
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
WTH? $662k for a Brain?
For what, a transplant? I'll volunteer to be a Brain Donor after my death, all right!
Not to donate anything,
To donate specific organs only,
To donate any organs/tissues for transplant, or
To donate any organs/tissues for transplant and/or research
If you're really concerned about this, just choose option b and list off what you are willing to give. Heck, some places may allow you to specify organs or tissues only for non-cosmetic transplants.
While I applaud the general idea of sticking to your moral principles, I have a hard time viewing a decision to not donate any of your organs to anyone as being "the good fight".
~ Leilah
So, how to fix it?
- Third, stop preventing people from bidding on the open market to buy organs from donors.
I say "stop preventing" very deliberately here. The problem is not what people should be "allowed" to do, as if the default were slavery. The problem is the state acting as though it owned your body, live and, especially, dead. It steals the opton to make a personal gain, and then scratches its head at the shortage of people willing to give freebies. It should just get the hell out of the way. Then, normal market forces will expand donorship - and provide a natural incentive for companies to develop cloned in-vitro organs.Needless to say, every "solution" that is based on forcing donors will fail dismally. People will opt for cremation, or travel abroad to die. Nobody loves a thief, and especially not a grave-robber.
This is not a troll. This is not flamebait. I mean every word.
I lived for meany years in a city that had no publicly funded ambulance service, and there were several competing companies going after this "business". At the time it seemed perfectly normal to me, and learning that there were places where the government ran the ambulances seemed like a waste of tax dollars.
I also had the "opportunity" once to ride in one of these ambulances. First, because I was conscious and rational, I could have refused the ambulance if I wanted. I think that the bill for the ride to the hospital was around $300, and this was just one more expense that is covered by whatever insurance is covering your situation in general.
For what it is worth, the law allows emergency responders to "take over" your decisions if you are unconscious, in shock, or acting irrationally. So, yes, you would be held liable for paying your ambulance bill even if you hadn't been able to consent.
To me, having the government run the ambulance service to haul injured people to the hospital makes about as much sense as having them run a tow-truck service to haul broken cars to the garage. Private enterprise has demonstrated in many cities that it is able to fill the gap.
Sure they can. AIDS patients can donate to other AIDS patients.
There's a little more to it than that. The HIV virus has several (many?) different strains; cross-infecting an individual with different strains would be A Very Bad Thing.
However, if a given AIDS patient could produce proof that they'd signed their organ donor card prior to infection (or to discovering they were infected), then I'd have no problem whatsoever to posthumously helping them out.
Condoms do break. I've had it happen. (Though not tonight... everything at the bar was skanky tonight. [sigh] Small towns.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This idea is viscerally satifying this moment, but wrongheaded nonetheless. What if no other registered donors need your fresh organ? Just let it rot away while some non-donor needs it?
Which is exactly what would happen if I didn't sign my organ donor card...
It's unpleasant, but so is imagining the doctors harvesting your corneas. Most people will (apparently, based on the number of donors) not do it. Maybe they would if there was something in it for them.
Think about it. Health insurance companies would love it. If you signed your organ donor card, you'd be more likely to get the organs you needed should you fall ill. Therefore, less life support and other healthcare costs when you're in for weekly dialysis or whatever else. Therefore, a break on your insurance costs.
There's another benefit to registering as an organ donor. In Ontario, you get a little sticker to affix to your driver's license (primary ID). When you get pulled over, the cop sees the sticker and most of them have seen enough unpleasantness that they are firm believers in organ donation. I had one tell me that he thought I was generous for a teenager, and that I didn't deserve a speeding ticket. (I was 16 with my freshly minted license and a 1973 Plymouth Duster with a 340-4bbl. He pulled me over for doing 120MPH on an empty freeway in the middle of the night. He'd been sitting on an overpass when I blew past with the exhaust dumps open, and it took him a couple of miles to catch up with me. If I'd had an accident, I'd have been an ideal donor if anything was left in the hamburger meat.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I don't share the same completely dim view of Biotech as you - at least in the sense of the time scale involved. It does seem to take the occasional brave leap forward by a company to "embarrass" some others into making a leap, other times there just happens to be profit in finding something more effective, more 'humane', with less side effects.
A combination of such things helped us progress forward in antidepressants, from monoamine oxidase inhibitors through tricyclics to SSRIs that can be prescribed by almost any practitioner (the book "The Synaptic Self" by Joseph Ledoux has a pretty good history on the subject)
That said, there always seems to be a cycle of 15-20 years from seeing something in a research paper/science magazine to seeing them come to fruition for the sake of humans, some of which I'm sure is related to IP issues, which are tougher to fault in medicine; there's more expense involved, and no direct equivalent of an open source movement :)
New-grown organs will make their way out of the lab slowly, but surely. Techniques with simple tissues, like skin,are already available. More complex multi-tissued organs that have to approximate embryonic growth patterns, kidneys for example, have had some success in animals, including pigs, but the age of the cells used for growth are really important at the moment.
There are two endeavors that will really help out the cause: telomerase research, which is one of the means to 'immortalize' cells - just read of some interesting advances in New Scientist where they've managed to immortalize a human muscle cell line with a hijacked retrovirus. This isn't a good option for most tissues, because it can make benign tumor growths keep growing, so they're trying the same experiment with adenoviruses instead for a 'one shot' version of the same effect.
The other is the nascent science of unravelling histone tails and their meanings. Histones are the spools around which DNA is wrapped. The histone 'tails' appear to determine what parts of the DNA get read/ignored/transcribed at any one time, and is one means outside of the DNA to control protein synthesis. Cracking this code could help us understand what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how histone tails might indicate whether a cell is a neuron, or a liver cell or what have you. It could also indicate why we've had some trouble with cloning (the DNA doesn't change, but the histone code does). Organ growing is akin to cloning on a limited basis, and often requires identical, less specialized or stem cell versions of the tissue you wish to generate.
One interesting fallout of organs grown this way - applied often enough until the technology gets cheap, and you have an interesting alternative to getting meat from animals.
That wouldn't be utopia, mind you. If there's a 'cheaper, more humane way' to get meat, we could lose some farm species. Not to mention that the 'vat meat' might be too uniform, get infected, and would constantly have to be screened for tumors :)
Something to think about :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
If people want to create groups where those within are preferential in line for body-part donations, then so be it. And so what if people want to sell their body parts (e.g., kidneys) while alive, or when dead, at market-price? One life is as valuable as another -- there is nothing particularly noble about saving the life of a poor person over a rich one, nor vica versa. The point is that a person's body is his or her own, and only s/he should decide what is done with it and in what manner, while alive and when dead. If, after I die, I want to sell my body parts to the highest bidder (so as to increase the estate that will be passed on to my heirs), then so be it. If I want it to be designated that they must go to a poor person in need of them, then so be it. If I want to designate that they can only go to an Indian, then so be it. I could also designate who they can't go to, and make a long long list (e.g., criminals and those I don't like).
Consider this scenario. If two people are on the verge of drowning, I only have enough time to save one. Now, under the law, I don't have to save either. I'm not required to do anything to help them. Now, obviously I have a choice to make. I may make it based on several criteria, but however I choose is irrelevant -- one person is going to die, another is going to live.
1. I choose to try to save the thinnest person, who I am most likely to be able to drag out of the water.
2. If they are two women, maybe I save the most attractive one.
3. If one of them is my friend/family member, maybe I save him or her.
4. If one of them is my enemy, maybe I save the other person.
5. If I know one of them to be more intelligent than the other, maybe I save that one.
6. If I know one of them to be loved and cared about by more people than the other, then maybe I save that one.
7. If one of them is offering me a million dollars to save him or her, maybe I save that one*. Hell, I could choose by any other material or immaterial thing they were offering me.
* Though the person may honor the verbal contract, it is unlikely to be held up in court, as it constitutes contract at gunpoint.
8. Maybe I choose randomly.
and so on and so forth. The point is, there are many criterion by which we judge. I may not even judge consciously. As far as the law and Constitution is concerned, regarding our right to life, we all have equal share in that right, and are all equal as persons to be bestowed rights. However, let's not pretend that we -- as individuals -- don't make judgements everyday about who's life and happiness is more important to us.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen