"Of course I accepted the brains...." Pt 2

More devotees of the patron saint sinner of pragmatism.
After all, those hearts and kidneys would just go to waste otherwise, (or be used to heat buildings?)

a kidney from an aborted child [was grown] inside a rat. It was transplanted by scientists hoping to grow enough organs someday to end the donor shortage. At the end of the video you will see a heart from an aborted child surgically transplanted into a rat.
[A company named Ganogen did this with the]  goal ... to save lives by providing organs for transplants to the thousands of patients on the transplant waiting lists including human babies with severe or fatal in utero diseases. That is, they are trying to grow the organs from unwanted and healthy aborted babies to transplant into wanted but unhealthy babies. [emphasis supplied]
[Ganogen has] found an immeasurably profound resource in aborted fetuses for experimentation and utility. In their own words, “Real human organs are not artificial.” (They know the human fetus is truly human. You do not have to be a medical student to grasp the obvious.)...
Biologists are well aware that they have not begun to discover all the mysteries of life. As the three young men of Ganogen acknowledged, “There are hundreds if not thousands of proteins and cytokines yet to be discovered, not to mention the highly intricate communication and interplay between the millions of cells within a human organ.”
So to them, it is not only ethical to use these aborted children’s bodies, it would be unethical not to use them and to waste them instead. ..
For them, the ethical question is simple and settled. Because abortion is legal, abortion is ethical. Because abortion is ethical, using the bodies of the aborted children to save the lives of other children is ethical, even responsible, even laudable. They have tapped into a resource (of human lives that do not matter) and are using that resource to save lives (that do matter).

Kidneys? Be Honest, Ya Got One You're Not Using

I don't care how much Miller you're gettin' your swerve on with, if you're healthy you have an extra kidney.
And there are a lot of people out there who need it.
And some of them have very little time to live and if only cadaver donations are available they will die before someone else's bad fortune makes an organ available.

You can save someone just like this little princess:
: Think about it.

You've Got Two of Them, and You Only Need One

Why not give your spare to someone who could really use it?

Really interesting story, of "paying it forward," as my brother put it. (I'm told protocol is such that I could get obtain a slot in such a chain for a loved one, were it necessary.)

In February 2011, the desk clerk at Mr. Ruzzamenti’s yoga studio told him she had recently donated a kidney to an ailing friend she had bumped into at Target. Mr. Ruzzamenti, 44, had never even donated blood, but the story so captivated him that two days later he called Riverside Community Hospital to ask how he might do the same thing.

Halfway across the country, in Joliet, Ill., Donald C. Terry Jr. needed a kidney in the worst way. ...With nobody in his family willing or able to give him a kidney, his doctors warned that it might take five years to crawl up the waiting list for an organ from a deceased donor.

“It was like being sentenced to prison,” Mr. Terry recalled, “like I had done something wrong in my life and this was the outcome.”

As a dawn chill broke over Chicago on Dec. 20, Mr. Terry received a plump pink kidney in a transplant at Loyola University Medical Center. He did not get it from Mr. Ruzzamenti, at least not directly, but the two men will forever share a connection: they were the first and last patients in the longest chain of kidney transplants ever constructed, linking 30 people who were willing to give up an organ with 30 who might have died without one.

What made the domino chain of 60 operations possible was the willingness of a Good Samaritan, Mr. Ruzzamenti, to give the initial kidney, expecting nothing in return. Its momentum was then fueled by a mix of selflessness and self-interest among donors who gave a kidney to a stranger after learning they could not donate to a loved one because of incompatible blood types or antibodies. Their loved ones, in turn, were offered compatible kidneys as part of the exchange.

Dear God in heaven, spare us...

... miserable sinners that we are.

There is no such thing as an over active imagination.
There is no such thing as reductio ad absurdem.
There is no such thing as a swiftian modest proposal so outrageous some demonic force will not cause the proposal to be made in earnest.

I made a typically snarky comment on Amy Welborn's about the selfishness of some celebrity proponents of ESCR not offering themselves or their loved ones for spare parts.

Because we wouldn't really take "spare parts" out of a human being without his express permission, (I know a little something about this, and the hoops I had to jump through when giving such an item.)
Right?
I mean, those wikced Red Chinese are supected, but civilized people....?
Right?

Slate describes a slippery slope that indicates otherwise:

Earlier this week, when President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos, I said the moral dilemmas in this field would become increasingly difficult.

Buckle up. We're on our way. Last week, the Oxford International Biomedical Centre held a symposium on "New Body Parts for Old: Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine." At the symposium, Oxford professor Richard Gardner delivered a talk titled "Stem Cells: What They Are and Why They Are Important." According to London's Daily Mail, Gardner told the audience that kidney and liver tissue from aborted fetuses offer "at least a temporary solution" to the shortage of available organs for people in need of transplants.

Calling for studies into the feasibility of transplanting foetal organs, Sir Richard, an advisor to Britain's fertility watchdog and the Royal Society, said he was surprised the possibility had not been considered, and that experiments in mice have shown that foetal kidneys grow extremely quickly when transplanted to adult animals. Sir Richard said: "It is probably a more realistic technique in dealing with the shortage of kidney donors than others."

Two arguments have persuaded the United States to fund stem-cell research using destroyed embryos. One is that the research will save lives. The other is that the embryos, left over from fertility treatments, will otherwise be wasted.

Both arguments are now being applied to fetuses. The Daily Mail notes:

Almost 7,000 of the 8,000 Britons waiting for a transplant need a kidney. More than 300 are hoping for a liver, 222 need lungs and almost 100 have requested a heart. Kidney donors have a less than one-in-three chance of receiving an organ in any given year, and hundreds on the transplant list will die before a donor becomes available.

Furthermore:

Professor Stuart Campbell, who has argued for the abortion time limit to be lowered, had no ethical objections to the proposal. He said many babies were aborted quite late, "and if they are going to be terminated, it is a shame to waste their organs."

The argument against fetal tissue is that because it's less fundamental and less pliable than embryonic stem cells, it's less useful for research. But in some ways, its advanced development makes it more logical as a source of transplants. As Gardner pointed out, our prospects for engineering completely functional organs from stem cells are "remote." And if stem cells do prove useful in this endeavor, fetuses may still be crucial. Four days ago, Art Caplan, a leading bioethicist who supports Obama's stem-cell policy, observed:

No one … knows what the best source of stem cells will be for treating diabetes, spinal cord injuries or cardiac damage from heart attacks. No actual scientist can say with any degree of certainty whether it will be embryonic, fetal, adult, cloned or induced stem cells—those made by modifying adult stem cells so that they act like embryos—that will prove most effective. It will take a lot of money and at least five to 10 years to find out.

From this uncertainty, Caplan concluded that "embryonic stem cell research ought to be generously funded and aggressively pursued."

Why isn't the same true of research on fetuses?

Would you give 17 days of your time....

... to save someones life?
A new kidney removal method for family or altruistic living-donor donations sounds remarkable:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/health/AP-MED-Bellybutton-Kidney.html?scp=1&sq=bellybutton&st=nyt
Brad Kaster donated a kidney to his father this week, and he barely has a scar to show for it. The kidney was removed through a single incision in his bellybutton, a surgical procedure Cleveland Clinic doctors say will reduce recovery time and leave almost no scarring.
''The actual incision point on me is so tiny I'm not getting any pain from it,'' Kaster, 29, said Wednesday. ''I can't even see it.''
Kaster was the 10th donor to undergo the procedure at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Inderbir S. Gill and colleagues at the research hospital on Thursday were to perform the 11th such procedure, which Gill said could make kidney donations more palatable by sharply reducing recovery time.
More than 80,000 Americans are awaiting kidney transplants. Last year, there were about 13,300 kidney donors in the U.S., and about 45 percent were living donors, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
The first 10 recipients and donors whose transplants used the single-incision navel procedure have done well, according to the researchers. They report on the first four patients in the August issue of the Journal of Urology.
Preliminary data from the first nine donors who had the bellybutton procedure showed they recovered in about just under a month, while donors who underwent the standard laparoscopic procedure with four to six ''key hole'' incisions took just longer than three months to recover.
The clinic says the return to work time for single-point donors is about 17 days, versus 51 for traditional multi-incision laparoscopic procedure.
Patients of the new procedure were on pain pills less than four days on average, compared with 26 days for laparoscopic patients.

Let me tell you, I would have been very happy not to have taken so much morphine and morphine derivatives....

The Church and Organ Donation

I was reminded today, when people at rehearsal (I'm so tired, I'm so tired, I'm so tired....) spoke about surgery:
As I was driving to church for choir last night, (or rather, to the rectory and the Blessed Copy Machine, my best friend and patron saint, although unlike my predecessor, I don't think I am ever spoken of as having "toner in my veins,") I heard maybe 20 seconds on Relevant Radio, Drew Mariani, I think the host of the show is?
And from a snippet of conversation, obviously the tail end of the discussion, I received the impression that someone had espoused, or at least failed to debunk, the notion that live donor organ donation is somehow not in keeping with Catholic teaching, if "beauty" is affected.
Tell me I heard wrong, and no one thinks anything so absurd, and dare I say, evil?
Anyone (of my 2.7 readers,) ever heard such a thing?

Transplant debacle

I hate to read this kind of news.
From what I have read, it strikes me that the surgeon did nothing wrong, that a gross misunderstanding has arisen, but it horrifies me the chilling effect this could have on potential donors.
One solution, of course, is for people reading this to be LIVING donors.
Most of you reading this have a spare kidney.
And you can do without part of your liver for a while, (it'll grow back.)
Save a life.
Give now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/us/27transplant.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

Desperately Seeking a Kidney

No, not me.... but plenty of other people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16kidney-t.html?pagewanted=all
You don't need both of yours, why not check into GIVING SOMEONE BACK HIS LIFE by offering your spare?
Theoretically, kidneys should be in booming supply. Virtually everyone has two, and healthy individuals can give one away and still lead perfectly normal lives.
Yet people aren’t exactly lining up to give.
At the beginning of 2005, when I put my name on the list, there were about 60,000 people ahead of me; by the end of that year, only 1 in 9 had received one from a relative, spouse or friend.
Today, just under 74,000 people are waiting for kidneys.
I found the article interesting, a bit surprising in how little it mirrored my experience.
A potential donor "needed to talk it over with her husband but thought it would be fine."
(A step I almost forgot until it was insultingly late.)
But then a knowledgeable friend "talked her out of it."
The knowledgeable friend, a transplant surgeon seems merely to have informed her about some of the risks.
The "chance of death [that is so] tiny" the recipient poo-poohs it even as she reports it?
Put it this way.
Imagine something you want or need -- say the amount of money it would take, however many millions, to change your life and the lives of everyone you love, utterly and irrevocably for the better. Now double it, just to make the reward of this step you're about to take really meaningful. Okay? And there it is for the taking, on that table. Oh, one problem... it is attached to a bomb. And there is a chance, one in 5,000, that it will blow up and kill you. So yeah, that means that there is a 4,999 in 5,000 chance everything will be fine.
I don't know how you can call someone else's 1 in five thousand chance of death "tiny," frankly.
Let me say right now, I don't know if that is even an accurate statistic.
And it is certainly one I can call tiny. I'm entitled. But she, frankly, does not have that right.
I am also taken aback at her supposition that no one who is squeamish about blood and pain would step up to the plate.
She doesn't know anyone with a greater aversion to needles than I, or a bigger wuss about pain.

I am not sure how I feel about this:
Altruism is a beautiful virtue, but it has fallen painfully short of its goal. We must be bold and experiment with offering prospective donors other incentives for giving, not necessarily payment but material reward of some kind — perhaps something as simple as offering donors lifelong Medicare coverage. Or maybe Congress should grant waivers so that states can implement their own creative ways of giving something to donors: tax credits, tuition vouchers or a contribution to a giver’s retirement account.
In short, we should reward individuals who relinquish an organ to save a life because doing so would encourage others to do the same. Yes, splendid people like Virginia will always be moved to rescue in the face of suffering, and I did get my kidney. But unless we stop thinking of transplantable kidneys solely as gifts, we will never have enough of them.
Not at all sure...
But the concept of “tyranny of the gift” she goes into fascinates me.
Because what developed is a sort of dread, not of the recipient's gratitude, but of that of one of her relatives. And it is not only I who suffer from it, but Himself.
This was as nearly as close to anonymous as any other altruistic donation could be, didn't know the family before, have only discovered third and fourth degree connections since (everyone in town, but us, is related...) and we have virtually nothing in common.
We meet for dinner once a year, if they remember.
The author is correct about the satisfaction of the donor. I suppose there is a bit of vanity in it -- it fulfilled my expectations of the person I pretend to be.

Anyway, where was I?
Oh, yeah.
Donate your organs.

Doncha just LURV reality shows?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/arts/30arts.html?ref=arts

Death Shapes a Reality Show


Impending death and organ donation are the attractions of a planned Dutch reality show that has been condemned as unethical and tasteless, The Associated Press reported.

But the BNN network plans to proceed with the program on Friday, saying it believes that the show will draw attention to a shortage of organ donors.

At least one parliament member said he would ask the government to block the broadcast of the “Big Donor Show,” produced by Endemol NV, creator of the “Big Brother” series.

On the show a donor identified only as Lisa, 37, who is terminally ill with an inoperable brain tumor, will hear interviews with three candidates, their families and friends before deciding who will receive one of her kidneys. “We know that this program is super-controversial, and some people will think it’s tasteless,” said Laurens Drillich, chairman of BNN, “but we think the reality is even more shocking and tasteless: waiting for an organ is just like playing the lottery.”

Marieke Saly, a spokeswoman for BNN, said there could be no guarantees that the donation would actually be made, but said “the intention” was that the transplant would be carried out before Lisa died. Under Dutch rules, her designation of a recipient would become invalid after her death.