By Tae Wan Kim, John Roberts, Alan Strudler, and Sridhar Tayur. In 2016, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) posed an increasingly consequential question: Should a large liver always be split if medically safe? During a split liver transplantation (SLT), a whole human liver is divided into […]
Category: Transplantation
Prize, Not a Price: How the right reward could solve the problem of kidney failure
By Aksel Braanen Sterri. Worldwide 1.2 million people are dying from kidney failure each year. The best treatment for kidney failure is a kidney transplant from a living donor, but too few people are willing to donate. In the paper, Prize, Not a Price: Reframing Rewards for Kidney Donors, I defend a way to meet […]
Why England’s new opt-out won’t help BAME communities
By Aileen Editha. In May 2020, an opt-out framework for deceased organ donations came into force in England. This means that, unless an adult individual has opted out, her organs could be donated after her death. This is otherwise known as ‘deemed consent’. This was enacted as an effort to solve the prominent organ scarcity […]
Ensuring equity in vascularized composite allotransplantation
By Laura L. Kimberly, Elie P. Ramly, and Eduardo D. Rodriguez Vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) can be considered the innovative cousin of solid organ transplantation. VCA is the transplantation of multiple tissues, such as skin, muscle, nerve, and bone as a functional unit. This includes facial, upper and lower extremity, uterine, penile and abdominal wall […]
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 […]
Reimagining Uterus Transplantation
By Amani Sampson, Laura Kimberly, Kara Goldman, David Keefe, and Gwendolyn Quinn. In 1931, a transgender woman named Lili Elbe received the first known uterus transplant in a human. Unfortunately, she died from organ rejection complications three months later. Her story is often missing from the emerging ethical discourse surrounding uterus transplantation. Our interest in exploring how uterus […]
Sculpting body parts: How the arts contribute to ethical reflection
By Sarah N Boers Recent advances in stem cell technology enable the cultivation of 3D human tissues in a dish called organoids or ‘mini-organs’ popularly. This constitutes only one example of the numerous ways in which human tissues can nowadays be utilized to create complex human tissue products. Growing commercialization can contribute to translating scientific promises […]
No Pain, All Gain: The Case for Farming Organs in Brainless Humans
Guest post by Ruth Stirton, University of Sussex (@RuthStirton) and David Lawrence, Newcastle University (@Biojammer) It is widely acknowledged that there is a nationwide shortage of organs for transplantation purposes. In 2016, 400 people died whilst on the organ waiting list. Asking for donors is not working fast enough. We should explore all avenues to […]
A Eulogy for the UK Donation Ethics Committee
Guest Post by David Shaw Re: The untimely death of the UK Donation Ethics Committee Most people I know want to donate their organs after they die. Why wouldn’t they? If you have to die, you might as well do your best to save several other lives once you’re gone. But organ donation is a […]
China’s Terrible Transplant Secret
Guest Post by Wendy Rogers Earlier this year, a Malaysian politician, Datuk Bung Moktar Radin, travelled to China to receive a kidney transplant. The details are scanty. There is no mention of the source of the kidney that the Malaysian MP received. Reports of foreigners travelling to China for transplants rarely make the media, yet […]