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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
Simply make donor status mandatory for a motorcycle license and eliminate the helmet laws.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
In the latest issue of Wired they have a page detailing how your body is roughly worth a cool 46 million
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.
Hopefully this won't turn into a Scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. "But I'm not dead yet!"
The dogcow says "Moof!"
...Slashdot readers around the world complain about problems with access to organs, mainly female breasts!
This seems like a good idea to me, except for one or two potential problems.
What if people wanted to leave the list? Would they have to return thier organs? If not, people could join if they needed organs, get the organs, then quit. Saying 'you can't join the list if you already need an organ' wouldn't be a very good rule, but 'you can't leave the list' wouldn't be too hot either.
Also, if organs were only availiable to donors, people whose religion said 'no donating' might not be able to get organs. Of course, a religion which allowed people to recieve organs but not give them would be a bit hypocritical.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I think it's Hawaii that rewards organ donors with preferred placement on the organ priority list.
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.
How about a small, legal form that says "I don't care what my family says; when I'm dead, take what you want. My estate waives all claim and title to the flesh." Include a card the size of a license that says so, as well as a contact number to confirm.
Or, a law that says you sign you drivers license if you DON'T want to donate, and assume anyone that doesn't sign wants to.
If your talking about execution, there are problems with organ donations from death row inmates. In most states lethal injection is the preferred method, the chemicals used in this process however are so powerful that they render all the organs useless, same with gas chambers. Old sparky also destroys organs pretty effectivly. I do remember hearing about one guy who chose the firing squad so his organs (asiddes from the heart and probably a lung then) could be harvested.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Easy enough for someone to be a condemned criminal in, say, China and wake up a piece at a time. Brings in lots of solid western currency too--far higher profit than prison labour to make running shoes.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"...or a scary flashback to how early 'subscription-only' fire departments worked?"
Or make less of an effort to save you because your organs are so badly needed. It wouldn't be the first time.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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?
There will be no shortage of organs when they're HARVESTED FROM CRIMINAL P2P USERS after the death penalty copyright infringement cases roll in.
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
So if i donate organs to organ donors, my organs will be redonated upon the recipiant's death. That's awesome. My spleen might live for 300 years in 15 differnt bodies with this program.
Getting more people to sign consent-forms, and even making sure that families aren't able to stop organ donation when consent has been given by the donor, won't solve the problem.
Truth of the matter is that there are simply not enough donors / not the right donors to provide all necessary organs. Where I live (Belgium) organ donation works as an opt-out system. There's a law that says that everybody is an organ donor (when they die) unless they have a certain form in their wallet stating the opposite. Hardly anybody opts out yet still there are not enough organs. Reason for this is that people that die tend to have been old and sick, or (if it's someone young) have most likely been in a traffic accident. None of these are the right circumstances for organ donation. Add to this the fact that you need matching blood types, have very little time for the organ harvasting etc... and it gets pretty obvious that taking organs from humans as spare bodyparts will only help a small percentage of cases.
I'd place my money on using organs specifically grown for harvasting: e.g. pigs are used to grow skin that helps burn victims.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
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.
I have a friend who's wife is a nurse in an emergency room. She talked me out of being an organ donor on my driver's license for this very reason.
It's not a case of doctors being 'evil', simply that if there's incentive for you to be dead, they might be pushed to make that decision about you while you still have a chance of 'coming back'.
She said you can put that kind of thing in your will. I haven't done that, but I guess I'm more worried about keeping me alive than someone else.
/.: why the hell am I here?
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.
"Subscription" fire departments collect revinue two ways, (a) by billing monthly insurance sytle, or (b) by billing you for the number of trucks, men, and feet of hose laid when there's an actual emergency.
Subscription fire departments don't ignore EMS and fire calls from people who didn't pay their premium - they just bill them on the back end.
Similarly, no priority is given by order of who paid up front and who didn't. EMS and fire calls are processed by order of severity, just like any non-subscription (read: municipal) emergency service provider.
Rural/Metro is one such company. There are numerous others - especially in the EMS (esp ambulance) business.
This is VASTLY different from giving priority to subscribers first for life-threatening medical conditions.
People should be able to sell rights to their post-mortem organs, and their non-vital organs like kidnies. Honestly I don't see what the big deal is.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The black market for organs already exists. Please read "Kill and cull: China rejects doctor's testimony". This article gives a chilling description of how Chinese "doctors" harvest organs from prisoners while they are still alive. These organs then go to wealthy customers in a growing black market.
I live in the city of Fullerton, CA. Like most municipalites in the U.S., it has faced a severe funding crunch over the past few years. In response, they have established a Paramedic Subscription Program. Basically, if you call a paramedic, you get billed by the city $200 for Basic Life Support and $300 for Advanced Life Support. If, on the other hand, you sign up for the service and pay an annual fee of $30, you do not pay. Ambulance costs (as they are pretty much everywhere in the U.S.) are not covered. Regardless of your payment status, though, they will come if you call.
While I have issues with calling paramedics and being charged in the first place (and, yes, I understand why they're doing it - to make ends meet and reduce frivilous calls), I can see where this fee makes a lot of sense to a business owner, who might see numerous 911 calls over a year (especially restaraunts, with choking/heart attack calls).
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Just raise speed limits in school zones to 170 MPH, as The Onion recommended.
1) Logistics. Currently organ networks will allow you to designate a person to whom you wish to donate, not a block of people. If your designee does not need the organ, it goes to the network. It is far easier to assess the organ need of one person than a whole group.
Although it is possible to sort through a list of people, it takes time. When people die, organs do not have a lot of time before they cannot be transplanted. With the current system, the most critically ill are at the top of the list. If the potential recipient doesn't meet the criteria (blood type, organ size, etc), it moves to the next person. If there are multiple lists, which one list should take priority? What if people are on multiple lists? The problem gets more complex. With one list, it is far easier to manage.
2) Discrimination. The current organ networks do not assess anything but need and medical criteria. They do not care about a recipient's race or socio-economic status. If LifeSharer's can designate which organs go to which people, what is to prevent a group like the KKK or Rich Republicans from starting a list. Although it is unlikely that such a group will every get a list, any use of such group like LifeSharers faces many legal problems. If someone less critically ill receives an organ from LifeSharer' than someone who is more critically ill and not on LifeSharer's, doesn't the hospital, transplant teams, and organ network face a wrong death and discrimination lawsuit should the more critically ill person die. There would be a gaggle of lawyers lined up to take the case.
3) A gift should have few if any conditions. Besides being able to designate a "potential" donee, donors understand that they are freely giving their organs to anyone. The more stipulations, the more that "gift" becomes a contract. Contracts can then become mired in legal problems.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The August issue of Wired (11.08) has a spread titled "How To Sell Your Body For $46 million" (pp46-47). Not sure if it is online yet but some of the highlights:
Fluids and Tissues: $43million
Lungs: $116,000
Heart: $57,000
Eyes: $8,000
Brain: $662,000
Kidney: $92,000
Pancreas: $46,000
Small Intestine: $72,000
Liver: $474,000
There is a more detailed breakdown, but those are the major points.
Small story from reuters: It may be illegal, immoral and certainly ill-advised, but selling every usable part of your body could fetch upward of $45 million
The first organization that learns to grow these organs individually will make a killing.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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.
Everybody has something that somebody else can use, so anybody can join LifeSharers, no matter how sick you are. Most people who can't donate organs can donate corneas, tissue, etc. Join LifeSharers at http://www.lifesharers.com/enroll.htm. It's free. It could save your life.
Meanwhile, any technology that could plausibly rebuild your brain after the damage from disease or trauma, the ischemic damage, and the enormous damage from cryopreservation itself, is pretty clearly not going to have a lot of trouble building you a new body. Probably a new body that you won't be able to distinguish from the original one.
Not to say that plenty of people won't go for whole-body anyway, but I can't say I believe they'll be doing it on the basis of being more "informed". They'll be doing it on the basis of the same religious and sentimental factors that make anybody else not donate organs.
"If you want to be eligible to receive transplanted organs should you ever need them, you must be a registered organ donor."
Except I'd imagine a lot of the people who need organs don't have much in the way of usable organs themselves. Or are we so desparate that we'll take organs from smoking alchoholics?
My question is... what about kids? At what age do we decide that they can make their own decisions about transplants? Can their parents decide for them? There was a young (I think 5-year-old) boy around here who just had a heart transplant recently. Would it have been ethical to deny him that heart because he's not of age to decide to donate?
As good as an organ-sharing system may sound, I think that the only way organ donations will increase is if someone works out an incentive plan. Given how few people think that something bad might happen to them, how likely is this group to make much of a difference?
Besides, personally, I have a hard time with giving organs preferentially to altruistic people. They should go to the ones who need them the most, no matter how appealing it might be to reserve them for other nice folks.
As for religious objections to organ donation... I don't know of any religions that believe you should refuse to donate organs but that will happily allow acceptance of them, so these people are hardly abusing the system - no matter how "dumbass" you think their beliefs are.
~ Leilah
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.
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 have donated an organ already, because of that, I get preference over someone who has not.
There are a variety of different factors that go into determining who is eligible to receive an organ. Some are, but not limited to, location, blood type, general health, how quickly can you be ready to recieve the organ when it is availble, etc.
My aunt got lucky one 4th of July several years ago. Some had dies in car accident, me he rest in peace, and was a perfect match for my aunt. My mom was signed up as her back-up contact. Well, the hospital called my home and I happened to anwer. My aunt had an hour to call the hospital and verify that she would be able to make it there within four hours. Let me tell you, we were calling everybody we could think to call. Finally someone thought to call as many radio stations that we could get a hold of in the area. We had to call my aunt's nurse back and the nurse had to call the radio stations. My aunt called the hospital with less than 15 minutes before the organ went to some else.
And as several people have already pointed out,
if you need an organ, there would be no way you could ever donate because of all the anti-rejection drugs you have to take.
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