Every year, “thousands” of people “die waiting” for a kidney transplant, notes ABC News. There just aren’t enough human kidneys available for all the people who need them.
But now, there is new hope for people who need a kidney transplant — pig kidneys! NBC News reports:
Surgeons transplanted a pig’s kidney into a brain-dead man and for over a month it’s worked normally — a critical step toward an operation the New York team hopes to eventually try in living patients. The experiment marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a human….Scientists around the country are racing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research offer a remarkable rehearsal….“Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it’s looking like it is,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s transplant institute, told The Associated Press.
“It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery said on July 14 as he replaced a deceased man’s own kidneys with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig — and watched it immediately start producing urine.
The possibility that pig kidneys might one day help ease a dire shortage of transplantable organs persuaded the family of the 57-year-old Maurice “Mo” Miller from upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment….Attempts at animal-to-human transplants have failed for decades as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue. Now researchers are using pigs genetically modified so their organs better match human bodies.
Earlier, the New York Post wrote about “How pigs will save thousands of human lives through organ transplants.” Last January, David Bennett, a 57-year-old man with end-stage heart disease, received a genetically modified pig heart at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The cost of a heart transplant in the US was around $1.66 million in 2022, while pig transplants cost less, about $500,000.
Another way to make more organ transplants available would be to pay people to donate a kidney, or to give people incentives to become organ donors upon their death (such as reducing people’s driver’s license fee, in exchange for them listing themselves as future organ donors on their driver’s licenses). Lifting the ban on organ sales could save as many as 30,000 lives annually.
George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin points to a recent study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, titled “The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage.” It noted that the “106,000” people “who do not receive a transplant” due to the current kidney shortage “are fated to live an average of 5 years on dialysis therapy before dying prematurely.”
Somin and others say the ban on organ sales should be repealed to save lives. Back in 2011, kidney donor Alexander Berger explained why kidney sales should be legal in The New York Times. Berger was a researcher for GiveWell, a nonprofit that helps charitable donors decide where to give. Berger predicted that allowing kidney donors to be compensated would save countless lives by giving people an incentive to donate their kidneys, resulting in a vast increase in kidney donations.
Right now, people have to be unusually selfless to donate a kidney, since you have to spend several days in the hospital to donate one, take off a lot of time from work, and run a tiny risk of death. Few people are that selfless. The poor suffer as a result: as Berger notes, people unable to get kidney transplants now are “disproportionately African-American and poor.”
If kidney sales were legal, the taxpayers would save money, too. The government would be able to simply pay for kidney transplants for poor and elderly people who need them (including the cost of buying the kidney needed for the transplant), rather than paying for years and years of costly dialysis treatment through Medicare and Medicaid. The purchase price of a kidney would be much less than the ongoing cost of dialysis.
As Berger noted, if the government paid for kidneys, that would actually “save the government money; taxpayers already foot the bill for dialysis for many patients through Medicare, and research has shown that transplants save more than $100,000 per patient, relative to dialysis.” (By legalizing organ sales, one nation was able to eliminate waiting lists for transplants, and avoid the staggering costs of widespread dialysis.)
As Berger observed, people who receive compensation for their kidneys will not be “exploited.” While there is some risk associated with donating a kidney—the whole reason compensation is needed—“the risk of death during surgery is about 1 in 3,000,” smaller than many risks that everyone is already allowed to take in exchange for money or just for the heck of it. Moreover, a kidney donor’s “remaining kidney will grow to take up the slack of the one that has been removed.” So donating a kidney does not interfere with leading a normal life.
Professor Somin says the exploitation argument against organ sales is logically inconsistent. Most of the people who “oppose legalizing organ markets because they believe it would lead to exploitation” have “no objection to letting poor people perform much more dangerous work, such as becoming lumberjacks or NFL players.” The risk of dying during kidney donation (0.03 percent) is no higher than the risk of going sky diving twice or driving 20,000 miles (which is some people’s annual commute to work).
Moreover, as Somin notes,
In addition to offering payment to living donors, we can pay potential donors in advance for the ‘option’ of harvesting organs after they pass away, a strategy that eliminates any negative health effects on donors, since, by definition, the option can only be exercised after they have died, and have no further use for the organ themselves.
