The will to give
I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been thinking about organ transplantation. This 2006 article from living kidney donor and writer Virginia Postrel is a jaw-dropper:
Many hospitals and bioethicists seem to believe a demeaning set of assumptions:
- Normal people won’t give up an organ except under coercion.
- Anything that encourages a decision to donate is coercion.
- To avoid coercion, living donors should be discouraged.
Some transplant centers require intrusive psychological probes that scare people off. Some bioethicists treat benevolence or religious conviction as a mental disorder. Even relatively supportive transplant centers like mine make it easier to quit than to go through with it.
The scrutiny is particularly nasty when people want to give to “strangers”– not truly unknown people but patients they’ve gotten to know through Internet sites or news coverage. Many centers flatly refuse “directed donations” to specific strangers, forcing donors to lie about how they met recipients.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."
December 16th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Ummmmm………I’m an organ donor…..but living donor? I would always be stuck with that “What if my other kidney goes?” Unless of course it would be for someone in my family….
Does that make me selfish? Or perhaps psychologically “sound”
-Steve
www.thegenesherpa.blogspot.com