Eng 106 - Sales of Organs

Eng-106

December 11, 2015

Sales of Organs

Let’s begin by talking about the history of organ transplants. The first successful organ transplant was made possible with two doctors named Joseph Murray and J. Hartwell Harrison. It was a kidney transplant that was performed on twins in 1954. The name of the patients were Richard and Ronald Herrick, they needed to make this transplant possible because Richard was dying from a kidney disease and the transplant was successful when Ronald donated one of his kidneys to him. Since they were identical twins, they did not have to worry about a theory that was made by Peter Medawar of the topic of rejection, his work and research showed that the body makes rejections of foreign tissue and that that is a type of an immune response. As aforementioned, since they were identical twins the kidney did not look as if it was foreign to Richard’s body so it did not get rejected by his body.  Now more than half a million transplant surgeries have since been done since the first one in 1954. This was though a lucky transplant because Richard was lucky to have his bother donate his kidney and be a match. Sadly, nowadays there are about more than 123,000 people in the United States alone, that are on a waiting list to get an organ that can save their life,  and seven percent of those people, that is about 6500 people, die before they have the chance to receive a transplant (American Transplant Association, n.d.). For this reason, the Government should consider the values of legalizing the sales of organs.

To begin, many people could help save a person’s life and could also help themselves. As I aforementioned, there are thousands of people that die just waiting on the transplant list every year. Just think about how many people could be saved if the sale of organs was legal. “Here at home [U.S] the waiting list for kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs comes to nearly 100,000” (Forbes, S. 2007). The waiting period for an organ can take up to five years and has doubled since 2010 (Forbes, S. 2007). Lewis Burrows, M.D said in his article, it could not just help the donor and the recipient, but it could also be a win for the insurance company. “What would be the harm of providing a payment to the donating family of, let's say, $20,000? A liver transplant can cost upward of $300,000, a heart transplant $200,000, and a kidney transplant more than $100,000. In kidney transplantation, even the insurance company would benefit from the payment, since they would no longer have to pay for dialysis therapy” (Burrows, L. 2004). Although this is talking about the people who choose to donate it is still a way of selling their organ because either the patient or the family is choosing to opt in or opt out of the transplant donation. He goes on to say that years ago a nephrologist had offered him a chance to carry out more than two hundred transplants, with that his friend said that the donors that were donating their kidney would be paid two thousand dollars (Burrows, L.2004).