By Brendan Parent, Mary Homan, Olivia Kates, Wadih Arap, Brian Childs, and Kathy Kinlaw. Our bodies can have value after our death. Organs can be donated to save multiple lives through transplantation. Preserved cadavers or body parts may contribute to medical education to prepare future physicians to practice medicine on the living. Dead bodies can […]
Category: Organ donation
Should AI allocate livers for transplant?
By Max Drezga-Kleiminger, Joanna Demaree-Cotton, Julian Koplin, Julian Savulescu, and Dominic Wilkinson. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving rapidly. In the (recent) past, we could hide behind the knowledge that much of the ethical discourse around AI was in hypothetical terms – we were discussing what we should do in case technology progressed […]
Who gets to decide when I can’t? End of life decision-making and deceased donation
By Dominique E. Martin and Shih-Ning Then Most of us have ideas about how we want decisions to be made at the end of our lives, and some of us also have strong views about donating our organs and tissues after we die. Many of us appoint a loved one to make decisions on our […]
Why we can’t use opt-out to harvest organs
By Mustafa Qurashi The Organ Donation Act 2019 changed UK deceased organ donation policy: since May 2020, anyone who dies without opting out of the organ donor register may have their organs harvested for transplantation. The one-year buffer was designated to ensure high levels of public awareness of the change and of the option to […]
Response to Nix and Weijer: Close Eneph? SARS-CoV-2 challenge studies and altruistic kidney donation
By Abie Rohrig and David Manheim. In a recent blog post, Nix and Weijer argue that living kidney donation and volunteering for a COVID-19 challenge trial are disanalogous, and that “advocates of SARS-CoV-2 challenge studies must look elsewhere to justify the level of risk in these studies.” They offer three arguments to support this view: adverse effects […]
Consent and living organ donation
By Maximilian Kiener. Many people feel very gratified if they can donate an organ to their child or spouse in need. Others, however, are extremely frightened and secretly hope not to be compatible. In interviews, they admit to be ‘scared to death’ and ‘terrified all the way down.’ Yet, many of the most frightened eventually […]
Take care when testing manufactured organs on the deceased
By Laura Kimberly, Brendan Parent Every article about the organ transplant crisis starts something like this: In the United States in 2018, over 116,000 individuals were on the waiting list for an organ transplant. Yet of those on the waiting list, only 36,000 (31%) received a much-needed transplant to treat their end-stage organ failure, and […]
Will you give my kidney back?
By Eisuke Nakazawa and Keiichiro Yamamoto We provide a thought experiment about living donor kidney transplantation. We call this problem ‘organ restitution’. Mr. A offered to be a living related kidney donor for his relative, Mr. B, who developed renal failure. His postoperative course was smooth, and a year went by without any problems. One […]
England’s Opt-Out Policy Consultation – Excluded Organs and Tissues
By Nicola Williams, Laura O’Donovan and Stephen Wilkinson England is about to follow Wales by moving to an ‘opt-out’ system for deceased organ donation. Under such policies individuals are presumed willing to become organ donors after their death unless they have explicitly refused. The new system, also known as ‘deemed’ or ‘presumed’ consent, is expected […]
HIV-positive to HIV-negative living donor liver transplant – Life and death decisions
By Harriet Rosanne Etheredge, June Fabian, Mary Duncan, Francesca Conradie, Caroline Tiemessen, Jean Botha Waiting for legislative change in organ transplantation in South Africa feels like “Waiting for Godot”, especially considering the extreme shortage of donor organs in our country. Anyone who has seen Samuel Beckett’s iconic play by that name will appreciate that as […]