Word: donor
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Ethicists worry sometimes about the psychological damage done to both donors and recipients. How will children react in later life to being conjured up and used in this way? Consider the case of Michelle Kline, a contestant in the 1989 Miss America contest, who received a kidney from her brother 19 months before the pageant. She would not speak to him afterward, although they later reconciled. "The sense of having part of her brother inside her created tremendous tensions," says Renee Fox, a medical-sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The tyranny of the gift: "It was a feeling...
There will never be enough cadaver organs to fill the growing needs of people dying from organ or tissue failure. This places higher and higher importance, and risk, on living relatives who might serve as donors. Organs that are either redundant (one of a pair of kidneys) or regenerative (bone marrow) become more and more attractive. Transplants become a matter of high- stakes risk-calculation for the donor as well as the recipient, and the intense emotions involved sometimes have people playing long shots...
...more and more pressed to provide organs to save relatives. It is a bizarre request, of course, difficult to refuse, and can lead to ugly family conflicts. As Alexander Capron, a bioethicist at the University of Southern California, says, "a good medical team knows how to help a potential donor to say no." Often, doctors simply lie and say that the relative who does not want to do it is "not a match...
...Currys didn't waste time searching for bone-marrow donors outside the family. Instead, Lea Ann got pregnant. When that fetus miscarried, Lea Ann waited a month, then got pregnant again. The couple gained a healthy baby, Audrey, but she was an unsuitable donor. Within 12 weeks, Lea Ann was again pregnant, this time with Emily, whose tissue proved compatible. So doctors collected and stored the blood from Emily's umbilical cord -- blood rich in stem cells. Twenty months after Emily's birth, the cord blood was transplanted into her sister, then...
...operation. Today, more than eight out of 10 heart recipients live at least a year with their borrowed organs. For kidney transplants, first-year survival tops 90%. As success rates soar, doctors attempt ever more variations on the transplant theme: installing a new pancreas, lobes of a live donor's lungs, even several organs at once. But rising hopes mean more people will be disappointed. Some 23,000 Americans desperately await replacement organs this year; if current shortages continue, more than 2,000 of them will die before a donor is found...