If you or a loved one has needed an organ transplant, you know the problem firsthand: There are not enough organs for those who need them and there is a long waiting period.
That desperate need, and potential profits, have fueled a Frankenstein-like effort to find or create organs to give recipients a longer lease on life.
Different organs remain viable for different amounts of time after the patient has died, or after the organ has been taken from the deceased.
With so few organs available for so many in need, there’s tremendous pressure on scientists and industry to push the boundaries of medical ethics with products and procedures that can sound like mad science.
These vanguard developments raise fundamental questions about human life, the commodification of the human body, and the very definition of “human.”
Everyone can agree that this practice is abhorrent, but there are other new practices that raise more complex questions, including a new practice that some fear is being used to curb the dead donor rule.
Reviving the Dead—Partially
Doctors are using a relatively new procedure called NRP-cDCD (“normothermic regional perfusion with controlled donation after circulatory death”) to widen the window on organ transplants and make more organs available.Among other advantages, NRP “restores heart function” and allows “continuous warm blood perfusion,” the researchers write.
Transplants from Genetically Modified Animals
Scientists are in a race to develop genetically humanized animals for their organs. For example, scientists are currently trying to grow human organs in genetically altered pigs and other animals, and in 2017, the creation of what’s claimed to be the first part-human, part-pig hybrid was announced.With the advent of CRISPR gene editing (clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats) and stem cell science, an otherworldly new form of “chimeric” animals boasting human organs has made xenotransplantation viable.
After more mishaps, transplant doctors stopped work with animal organs altogether, Mezrich wrote, and “only implantation of inert tissue from animals, such as heart valves, continued.”
A major risk with transplantation is the human immune system attacking and rejecting the newly transplanted organ as foreign.
Issues With Transplantation Research
As the human body becomes more manipulatable by surgeons and scientists, the extent to which transplant research requires “living” human bodies also increases. This can complicate the mourning process for family members or play on the emotions of the organ recipients themselves.“Even though we realized she had already died and wasn’t coming back, there is still a respirator on and there is still a heartbeat. Psychologically it plays a game with you,” he said.
“The genetic modifications of the donor pig (including its heart) fell into two categories: those that inactivated pig genes and those that introduced human genes. In total, 10 different modifications were introduced, most to prevent graft rejection by the human immune system,” noted the journal.
Scientific and Ethical Experts Weigh In
While many applaud scientific breakthroughs that allow more organs for human transplants (and these developments can certainly be lucrative), others question the direction in which we are going. In a 2021 statement, the American College of Physicians (ACP) raised serious concerns about NRP-cDCD.The procedure, it said “is more accurately described as organ retrieval after cardiopulmonary arrest and the induction of brain death. It raises significant ethical concerns and questions regarding the dead donor rule, fundamental ethical obligations of respect, beneficence, and justice, and the imperative to never use one individual merely as a means to serve the ends of another, no matter how noble or good those ends may be.”
‘Humanized’ Animals
In a 2018 paper in the journal Embo Reports, authors worry that human stem cells transplanted into genetically altered pig embryos “will migrate to the animal’s brain and alter its behavior or cognitive state.” While such a brain presence could propel Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease research, “there is no consensus on accurately assessing what it means to possess a human-like cognitive state,” wrote the researchers.“Should personhood be defined as the percent of human brain cells expressed in a human-animal chimera...?” ask the researchers.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health has refused to support the transplantation of human-animal chimeras for this reason.
Moreover, could the advanced genetic technology we have today be used on “healthy human embryos to create designer babies for behavioral or cosmetic enhancements?” they asked.
Disease Transmission
Research in the magazine Philosophy Now raises another ethical question: The possibility of disease transmission and future pandemics occasioned by transplantation.“Diseases like HIV, Ebola, Hepatitis B, and, most recently, bird flu, originated in animals,“ wrote co-author Laura Purdy in the magazine. ”Pigs, where current xeno research is now focused, are thought to have been the vector of the devastating 1918 influenza epidemic.”
Known and unknown viruses are embedded in pigs’ DNA as they are in all mammals, says Purdy, and “currently harmless organisms, like the E. coli that lives in our guts, could pick up new, possibly harmful traits from the micro-organisms that came along for the ride on pig organs.”
Whether extreme NRP-cDCD surgery or the creation of pig-human chimeras, the race to harvest new organs has a dark side, according to experts.
“In some ways, the legal determination of death and medical practice are starting to diverge in ways that raise complex ethical and legal challenges we will increasingly face as a society,” Farahany of Duke University told The Epoch Times.
Beyond the moral issues of giving further intelligence to genetically modified pigs, or the health issues of inserting animal organs into people, there are fundamental questions about how we are commodifying the body and what it will mean for the sanctity of the body for future generations.
In a time when people can be fired or censured for not getting injected with a relatively new and unverified mRNA vaccine, which some describe as a gene therapy, these questions take on particular urgency.
And given that many of these organ failures are driven by preventable lifestyle factors, such as stress, diet, and a lack of natural movement, one has to wonder if we are putting scientific and commercial interests ahead of the human beings they are supposed to serve.