Organ Donation Research Paper

Organ transplantation provides a life-saving opportunity for those who have no other options. Men, women, and children of all ages, all ethnicities, and all walks of life have had organ transplants. The first successful transplant was performed between identical twins in Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1954. Since the beginning of national data collection in 1988, more than 560,000 transplants have been performed in the U.S. and success rates of recipients have continued to increase in number of years lived post-transplant, with many surviving 25 years and more. Unfortunately, organ transplantation cannot be made available to all who need it because there are not enough donors to meet the ever-increasing need for organ transplantation.

While the number of donors has grown, it has not kept pace with the need. As the graph below indicates, the gap is large and widens with each passing year. This imbalance results in an average of 100 waiting list deaths per week.

Organ donation took its first tottering steps in the late 1950s. Successful transplantation of tissues and cells, such as skin and blood, began a little bit earlier than that

(Tilney 2003). Organ transplantation has in the course of the last 50 years expanded exponentially, both in terms of survival rates and the number of people on the waiting lists. The range of conditions for which transplantation is offered has widened, and transplantable organs now include kidney, liver, heart, pancreas, and lung. Organ donors can provide all of these organs, while living donation is restricted to kidney and sections of the liver, lung, and pancreas. A consequence of this dramatic expansion in life-saving potentiality

We are moving into an era of “tissue economies”: the transfer and circulation of human tissue on a global scale

(Waldby and Mitchell 2006). This includes the donation of, and trade in, sperms and ova, as well as the in vitro fertilization and implantation of embryos, and, in some cases, the rental of uteruses for these embryos to grow in (surrogate motherhood). Tissue engineering (growing organs from stem cells cultivated in the laboratory) is a technology which might become a reality in the future. But considering the case of xenotransplantation (using genetically modified animals to harvest organs for humans), a technology which looked very promising 20years ago but came to a total halt because of the risks of zoonosis (transfer of viruses between species), one should be careful when assessing what clinical options organ engineering in the laboratory will be able to provide (Sharp 2007).

There are three metaphors that guide contemporary thinking about organ, tissue, and cell transplantation as