why there’s still a clear line between organ donation and organ harvesting

When it comes to preserving donated organs for transplantation, the last several decades gave doctors only one choice to keep them alive long enough to be useful. Chilled and transported to the recipients as quickly as possible to avoid spoilage. But a new generation of technology built with a much better understanding of organ structure and function is giving us a new option. Say goodbye to coolers and hello to sterile biospheres where organs are kept warm, fed, and with a private circulatory system until they’re ready to be transplanted. All of the surgeries done using warm, functioning organs have been a successes thus far, and the companies who make these organ-preserving devices are already eyeing improvements in sustaining organs using nutrient and temperature settings the donor organs need for their unique conditions, sizes, and shapes, instead of a general treatment for their organ type. Think of it as the donated organ getting first class transportation to its new home. But that’s making some people feel a bit uneasy…

According to reactions covered by MIT’s Technology Review, and repeated elsewhere, organs being restored to full function may be blurring the line between life and death, and not waiting a proper period of time means that instead of donating organs of a deceased patient, doctors are actually killing someone by harvesting his or her organs so others can live. In some respect, we do expect that sort of triage in hospital settings because after all, there’s only so much even the best medical techniques and devices can do to help patients and if doctors know that all efforts will be in vain, it only makes sense to save time, money, and resources, and give others a shot with the organs they need, something always in short supply. Wait too long to harvest the heart, liver, and kidneys, and they’ll start to die putting the would-be recipient at risk of life-threatening complications or outright transplant failure. However, if you don’t wait long enough, are you just helping death do its job and killing a doomed patient while her family watches? The fuzzier and fuzzier lines between life and death make this a very complicated legal and ethical matter.

But even considering this complex matter, the objections against refined organ harvesting miss something very important. Doctors are not taking patients who can make a full recovery into the operating room, extracting vital organs, putting them in these bio-domes, and sending them out to people in need of a transplant. These organs come from those who are dead or would die as soon as the life support systems are shut off with no possibility of recovery. Revive hearts which stopped after a patient died of circulatory disease and the patient will die again. Support organs inside the body of someone who is brain dead, or so severely brain damaged that recovery just can’t happen, and all you’re doing is extending the inevitable. It takes a lot more than a beating heart or working liver to actually live and these new preservation devices are not giving doctors an incentive to let someone die, much less speed up a patient’s death. They’re giving us a very necessary bridge towards the artificial or stem-cell grown organs we are still trying to create as thousands die of organ failure we can fix if only we could get them the organs they need…