Yesterday on the train to London, I read an article in Scientific American about the ethical ambiguities surrounding organ transplantation in an age when people's bodies can be kept alive even when the brain functioning that gives us what we understand to be "life" has ceased - when it is damaged beyond repair. The difficult tradeoff between principle and practicality is this: doctors must wait two minutes, 120 seconds after the last heartbeat before beginning the organ removal process - the idea being that by then there is absolutely no chance of the heart starting to beat again spontaneously. (Why 120 seconds? It's an admittedly arbitrary ethical safety procedure decided by an ethnics committee in the 1960s, when transplants first revolutionized medicine). However, each moment without oxygen damages the organs, and can diminish the chances of a successful transplantation- in effect endangering the life of the recipient. The article talks about a few fraught cases in the last few years as examples.
Tricky, tricky!...
"With thousands of people on waiting lists for organs, doctors are bending the rules about when to declare that a donor is dead. Is it ethical to take one life and give it to another?"
I leave you to ponder this with a really cool stop-motion drawing.
PS: For the record, if one day it comes to it, I'm down. They can take all my organs to give to the needy (except - and this is important, for obvious though not-strictly-logical reasons, the eyes... Sorry to get into this, but it's important. also, don't tell daddy I mentioned the D-word :)
To shake all this gloomy talk off, I think we all might need a little massage therapy.
Aaahhh, that's much better!
