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Organ Donation and Transplantation

Student’s Name

Institution of Learning

Course Title

Teacher’s Name

Date
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Organ Donation and Transplantation

Transplantation is a big step forward in the service of human science, and many

people today owe their lives to an organ transplant. One of the ways to cultivate a true culture

is organ donation to ensure health and even life for the sick, who sometimes have no other

hope. Organ donation is one of the most important components of transplantation, which can

be defined as a voluntary procedure for donating one's organs and tissues in favor of an

indefinite number of people.

Technical Aspects

Technically, translatology involves surgical intervention from the donor to the

recipient by implanting the tissues, cells, part of an organ, entire organs, or blood. However,

the heart is an organ that cannot be taken from a living being and is rarely donated

posthumously. To solve this problem, in 1982, Dr. Robert Jarvik invented the first artificial

heart implant that required the patient to be attached to a 350-pound air compressor and live

in the hospital for 112 days (Nordham, 2021). Even though the procedures can be intravital or

posthumous, surgeon practice proves that living donors' items are usually healthier as

transplanted within minutes of removal. Along with this evidence, the deceased donor's

organs can save people's lives by keeping them cold outside the body.

The key element of the procedure is tissue matching, a process accompanied by

screening both parties for viral infections and mental health problems aiming to prevent

rejection. Rejection is the recipient's immune system reaction of recognizing the transplanted

organ as foreign material, frequently resulting in the transplant organ's destruction and even

fatal cases (Hertl, 2023). However, as practice shows, perfectly matched item types can also

provoke patient complications. Thus, clinicians conducting transplantation pursue not a rare

perfect match but a close match applied with immunosuppressant therapy. Such therapy

effectively targets all parts of the immune system with different drugs suppressing, making
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the transplantation process less affected by the degree of matching (Hertl, 2023). For that

reason, transplantation items do not necessarily belong to an identical twin whose genes

exactly match the person's, as modern technologies have made it possible to take tissues even

from a different species. Therefore, transplantation technologies have developed over the

centuries, creating opportunities for modern surgery to transplant and challenged state

governments to change their policies in their favor.

Public Policy

Despite the history behind organ donation and transplantation being short in years,

medical breakthroughs made by previous centuries' surgeons cannot be underrated. Many

operations conducted before success in 1954 were experiments resulting in failure that shared

stereotypes about the inhumanity and ethnicality of such actions. The cause has become an

exemplar of a process championed by science and public education, transforming

transplantation from mythology into reality. The first step to government involvement in

transplantation was made owning to regulation and organization has helped transplants gain

widespread acceptance among the public. The National Uniform Anatomical Donation Act of

1967 allowed individuals to donate organs and tissues for transplantation at death (Nordham,

2021). As a result, several transplant centers and "banks" providing individual responsibility

for finding donors, restoring organs, and ensuring the logistics of donors have arisen in the

United States. The perpetual success of organ donation has encouraged other countries

around the globe to develop this policy. Till the end of the 20th century, the National Organ

Transplantation Act established a national network for organ allocation and data collection on

donation, transplantation, and patient outcomes.

Today, modern society determines transplantation as a way to save a person's life or

to survive, provoking the high evaluation of demands for donors' items. Since 1988, over

800,000 transplants have been performed in the United States (Nordham, 2021). However,
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the fact that the number of willing recipients is higher than that of donors creates new

challenges for state governments. The Office of Health Resources and Services, the US

Department of Health and Human Services agency, has announced a Modernization Initiative

that includes several measures to increase accountability and transparency in the Organ

Procurement and Transplantation Network (HRSA, 2023). This instrument allows patients to

observe details about organ procurement, waitlist and transplant outcomes, and organ

donation and transplant demographics of individual transplant centers and organ procurement

organizations. The initiative also involves doubling the United States budget for agency-

related work to $67 million (HRSA, 2023). The main problem of current transplantation is

the shortage of organs, causing patients who were in turn for an organ transplant to die.

Personal Opinion/Conclusion

Transplantation is one of the most progressive branches of medical science and

practice, which is actively developing today, introducing new technologies and ideas into

other medical areas. Today, both adults and children living around the globe need transplants

as the only trace leading to life, but many of them will never have such an opportunity.

Therefore, the value of this procedure is determined by its nature to save people's lives and

fates. On the other hand, the modern world still faces society's negative attitude towards

transplantation. I think that in most low-income countries, organ transplantation is not

associated with saving lives but with stories about kidnapping and selling organs. Lack of

resources to survive causes people to become criminals. This state of affairs emphasizes the

medical field and legislation as the milestone of implementing the policy. Feeling scared

about others' lives, both parties, including donors and recipients, are afraid to become victims

of the organ trade.

The achievements of modern science open up limitless prospects for doctors to save

one person by transplanting organs or tissues of another, but the ethical complexities cannot
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be condemned. Ethical principles from six workable theories include autonomy, beneficence,

nonmaleficence, justice, fidelity, and veracity. In my opinion, fairness, fidelity, and veracity

are fundamental criteria that comply with the current healthcare policy. As the ethics

transplantation is the development and respect of human dignity, where human life can only

be an end but never a doctor's tool. Beneficence or do good can be considered as the most

difficult moral task for doctors. Respectively, transplantation aims to save the patient's life

and, in fatal cases, to give hope to other people on a "waitlist" for donation.

Nonmaleficence, or do no harm, directly intertwines the one mentioned above, as

almost every person on the operating table can automatically become a donor after death. The

humane goal of prolonging and saving the recipient's life loses humanity's status when the

means of achieving it harms the life and health of the donor. Self-determination or anatomy

determines the presumption of consent to become a donor. Frequently, doctors neglect this

principle, as the sooner organs or tissues are removed from the deceased body, the greater the

chance of success. In my opinion, interpreting as consent the absence of expressed refusal in

cases of posthumous intervention violates this criterion. Therefore, I believe the

transplantation can be justified only with the independent donor's consent as a gesture of fully

realizing our being with special human dignity.

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References

Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). (2023, March 22). Hrsa announces

Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Modernization initiative.

HHS.gov. https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/22/hrsa-announces-organ-

procurement-transplantation-network-modernization-initiative.html

Hertl, M. (2023, September 29). Overview of transplantation - immune disorders. MSD

Manual Consumer Version.

https://www.msdmanuals.com/home/immune-disorders/transplantation/overview-of-

transplantation

Nordham, K. D., & Ninokawa, S. (2021). The history of organ transplantation. Baylor

University Medical Center Proceedings, 35(1), 124–128.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08998280.2021.1985889