Kieran Healy

Blood and Guts

Organ donation is back in the news. CNN is running a story about a proposal to test cash incentives for organ donations. Maureen Dowd has a column about her niece who is that rarest of things, a live liver donor. And in the blogosphere, John Quiggin is complaining about a transplant-based example designed to show the problems with consequentialism.

All of which can mean only one thing: I need to finish writing my book. I’m in the process of revising my dissertation, Exchange in Blood and Organs, into something fit for the reading public. I’ve published a few papers from it already, like this one [pdf] and this one [pdf]. Those are about blood. On organs, one paper should appear later this year in a Russell Sage volume. And right now I’m working hard to revise and resubmit a paper about the determinants of organ procurement rates in the United States.

I plan on finishing the book this fall and spring, when I’ll be on leave at the RSSS in Canberra. Although my advisor wants me to call it The Political Economy of Blood and Guts, it doesn’t look like that title is going to make it to the final round of contenders.

The Star Tribune also ran an article today (Sun) about organ donors.

Oooh—the RSSS fellowships are nice deals. And I really enjoyed living in Canberra (though I was not on such a fellowship). While you’re there, look up Jeremy Shearmur, who when last I knew was starting a project on Titmuss, blood, etc.

The big British Gastro journal is, in fact, named “Gut”. Their Hematology journal is named “Blood”. Why mince words?

I saw a very interesting proposal a few years ago on organ donation that seemed to have the best advantages of pay-for-organs plans (i.e. lots more organs donated) without the worst disadvantages (i.e. coarsening of society’s views toward human life and the human body, commodification of people, poor people selling organs that they shouldn’t etc.)

The proposal was this: have two organ transplant lists, one for people who have signed up to donate their organs in the event of premature death and their dependents; and one for people who don’t sign up. Organs would be distributed first to the former group, then to the latter.

So by signing up to donate an organ now upon your death later, you would vastly improve the chances that you and your minor children would get organs if you ever needed them. I suspect most people would flock to sign away their organs upon their death if it would mean that they and their kids would have a better chance of surviving if they ever needed an organ.

The nice thing is, we would probably have more than enough organs at that point, even for the people who didn’t sign up to be donors, because so many people wouldn’t want to take the chance of not getting a needed organ.