Transplant technology is developing so rapidly that new practices are outpacing society's ability to explore their moral implications. The first kidney transplants were performed over 35 years ago and were greeted as the brave new world: an amazing novelty. Today the transplant is part of the culture -- conceptually dazzling, familiar in a weird way, but morally unassimilated. The number of organ transplants exceeds 15,000 a year and is growing at an annual clip of 15%. The variety of procedures is also expanding as surgeons experiment with transplanting parts of the pancreas, the lung and other organs. As of last week, 23,276 people were on the waiting list of the United Network for Organ Sharing, a national registry and tracking service.
A dire shortage of organs for these patients helps make the world of transplants an inherently bizarre one. Seat-belt and motorcycle-helmet laws are bad news for those waiting for a donor. The laws reduce fatalities and therefore reduce available cadavers, thus inviting the mordant thought that the speed limit should be raised when the donor-organ supply is low.
A doctor's new dilemma: two weeks ago, Ronald Busuttil, director of UCLA's liver-transplant program, heard that a liver, just the right size and blood type, was suddenly available for a man who had been waiting for a transplant. The patient, severely ill but not on the verge of death, was being readied for the procedure when Busuttil's phone rang. A five-year-old girl who had previously been given a transplant had suffered a catastrophe. Her liver had stopped functioning. Busuttil had to make a decision. "I had two desperately ill patients," he says, but the choice was clear. Without an immediate transplant, "the little girl certainly would have died."
Most organs come from cadavers, but the number of living donors is rising. There were 1,788 last year, up 15% from 1989. Of these, 1,773 provided kidneys, nine provided portions of livers. Six of the living donors gave their hearts away. How? They were patients who needed heart-lung transplant packages. To make way for the new heart, they gave up the old one; doctors call it the "domino practice."
Ethical thought about the living-to-living transplants divides into two general perspectives, two systems of thought that are in many ways as incompatible as Apple and IBM. On one side are the non-alarmist accommodationists. On the other side are the biotechnical Luddites.
The accommodationists review the history of innovation. In the '50s, when artificial insemination with donor semen was introduced, many ethicists said it separated procreation from marriage in a destructive way. Pope Pius XII, who denounced artificial insemination even from husband to wife, declared, "To reduce the cohabitation of married persons and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of the germ of life would be to convert the domestic hearth, sanctuary of the family, into nothing more than a biological laboratory." When Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in England in July 1978, alarmists warned of a brave new world in which government would control the production of children.
The accommodationists, in other words, argue that all new things are initially strange and disconcerting but eventually become familiar, unthreatening and more or less acceptable. It is an ethical point of view that reposes faith in the common sense of society to weed out the potential horrors.
In 1972 Dr. Thomas Starzl, the renowned Pittsburgh surgeon who pioneered liver transplants, stopped performing live-donor transplants of any kind. He explained why in a speech in 1987: "The death of a single well-motivated and completely healthy living donor almost stops the clock worldwide. The most compelling argument against living donation is that it is not completely safe for the donor." Starzl said he knew of 20 donors who had died, though other doctors regard this number as miraculously low, since there have been more than 100,000 live-donor transplants.
Transplant technology is developing so rapidly that new practices are outpacing society's ability to explore their moral implications. The first kidney transplants were performed over 35 years ago and were greeted as the brave new world: an amazing novelty. Today the transplant is part of the culture -- conceptually dazzling, familiar in a weird way, but morally unassimilated. The number of organ transplants exceeds 15,000 a year and is growing at an annual clip of 15%. The variety of procedures is also expanding as surgeons experiment with transplanting parts of the pancreas, the lung and other organs. As of last week, 23,276 people were on the waiting list of the United Network for Organ Sharing, a national registry and tracking service.A dire shortage of organs for these patients helps make the world of transplants an inherently bizarre one. Seat-belt and motorcycle-helmet laws are bad news for those waiting for a donor. The laws reduce fatalities and therefore reduce available cadavers, thus inviting the mordant thought that the speed limit should be raised when the donor-organ supply is low.A doctor's new dilemma: two weeks ago, Ronald Busuttil, director of UCLA's liver-transplant program, heard that a liver, just the right size and blood type, was suddenly available for a man who had been waiting for a transplant. The patient, severely ill but not on the verge of death, was being readied for the procedure when Busuttil's phone rang. A five-year-old girl who had previously been given a transplant had suffered a catastrophe. Her liver had stopped functioning. Busuttil had to make a decision. "I had two desperately ill patients," he says, but the choice was clear. Without an immediate transplant, "the little girl certainly would have died."Most organs come from cadavers, but the number of living donors is rising. There were 1,788 last year, up 15% from 1989. Of these, 1,773 provided kidneys, nine provided portions of livers. Six of the living donors gave their hearts away. How? They were patients who needed heart-lung transplant packages. To make way for the new heart, they gave up the old one; doctors call it the "domino practice."Ethical thought about the living-to-living transplants divides into two general perspectives, two systems of thought that are in many ways as incompatible as Apple and IBM. On one side are the non-alarmist accommodationists. On the other side are the biotechnical Luddites.The accommodationists review the history of innovation. In the '50s, when artificial insemination with donor semen was introduced, many ethicists said it separated procreation from marriage in a destructive way. Pope Pius XII, who denounced artificial insemination even from husband to wife, declared, "To reduce the cohabitation of married persons and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of the germ of life would be to convert the domestic hearth, sanctuary of the family, into nothing more than a biological laboratory." When Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born in England in July 1978, alarmists warned of a brave new world in which government would control the production of children.The accommodationists, in other words, argue that all new things are initially strange and disconcerting but eventually become familiar, unthreatening and more or less acceptable. It is an ethical point of view that reposes faith in the common sense of society to weed out the potential horrors.In 1972 Dr. Thomas Starzl, the renowned Pittsburgh surgeon who pioneered liver transplants, stopped performing live-donor transplants of any kind. He explained why in a speech in 1987: "The death of a single well-motivated and completely healthy living donor almost stops the clock worldwide. The most compelling argument against living donation is that it is not completely safe for the donor." Starzl said he knew of 20 donors who had died, though other doctors regard this number as miraculously low, since there have been more than 100,000 live-donor transplants.
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