Adult and child holding kidney shaped paper on textured blue background.

Nudging Organ Donation in the United States

Cross-posted from Harvard Law Today, where it originally appeared on November 13, 2020. 

By Chloe Reichel

Nationally and globally, demand for organ transplants outstrips supply. In the United States last year, 19,267 donors made a record-setting 39,718 transplants possible, but nearly 109,000 Americans still remain on the organ transplant waiting list.

Cass Sunstein ’78, Robert Walmsley University Professor and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration, believes “Nudge theory” might help bridge this gap between supply and demand.

Sunstein joined scholars and leaders in transplant services on Friday, Nov. 6 to discuss strategies to boost rates of organ donation at “Nudging Organ Donation: Tools to Encourage Organ Availability,” an event hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

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Hands close-up of surgeons holding medical instruments.

COVID-19 and Organ Transplantation

By James W. Lytle

After a banner year for organ transplantation in the United States in 2019, the success became a tattered memory by April 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit major cities in the U.S. with its full fury.

A record number of 39,178 organs were donated in 2019, including 7,397 organs from living donors, also an all-time high.  After several years of adverse media and regulatory scrutiny, LiveOn NY, the organ procurement organization (OPO) that serves the Metropolitan New York City region, proudly reported that a total of 938 organs had been transplanted in 2019, another record that represented more than a fifty percent increase over the transplant total in 2015.

By late April 2020, however, organ transplantation activity in New York State had reportedly declined by ninety percent.

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Rethinking Organ Donation: When Altruism Isn’t Enough

By: Gali Katznelson

The demand for donated organs greatly outweighs the supply. In the United States alone, there are roughly 115,000 people waiting for an organ transplant. Every ten minutes, a new person is added to the recipient list, and every day, 20 people on the list die waiting. To be an organ donor in most states, residents can choose to add their names to the donor registry through a simple online or in-person process. But this “opt-in” system is failing to entice enough people to become organ donors. Currently, 54% of Americans are on the donor registry, but very few registrants are available to donate at a given time, in large part because the vast majority of registered donors have opted to do so posthumously. Better policies are needed to encourage more people to donate, both as living donors and as registered posthumous donors. It’s time to consider a non-monetary incentive system that prioritizes those who have signed up as organ donors.

Before jumping into an incentive-based system, let’s consider other options: namely “opt-out” and “mandated choice.” Following in the footsteps of 25 countries, including Spain and Wales, states such as Connecticut and Texas have made attempts to implement “opt-out” policies. In an “opt-out” system, each person is presumed to be an organ donor unless they explicitly choose not to be. Countries with opt-out policies have donor registration rates averaging 90%. But attempts to pass such legislation in the US have been met with fierce opposition. Likely, this is due to Americans’ unique emphasis on individual rights and skepticism of government control. Moreover, in such a system, family members may question the wishes of the deceased if they are unsure that the person was aware of the policy. In such cases, the family’s wishes will likely override the seemingly ambiguous wish of the deceased.

Alternatively, a “mandated choice” system is one in which people are faced with a compulsory choice regarding organ donation. In the US, Texas first tried this in the 1990s, where checking “yes” or “no” to organ donation became a condition for obtaining a driver’s license. Without adequate public education, 80% of people chose not to donate and the law was eventually repealed. More recently, Illinois experienced success with a mandated choice system. There, anyone receiving or renewing a driver’s license or an identification card is faced with the choice of becoming an organ donor. As a result, 60% of adults have now agreed to donate. This is a good start, but we can do better.

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Chimeras with benefits? Transplants from bioengineered human/pig donors

By Brad Segal

In January of this year, Cell published a study modestly titled, Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. It reports success bioengineering a mostly-pig partly-human embryo. One day before, Nature published a report that scientists had grown (for lack of a better word) a functioning genetically-mouse pancreas within the body of a genetically-modified rat. The latest study raises the likelihood that before long, it will also be scientifically possible to grow human organs within bioengineered pigs.

The implications for transplantation are tremendous. But hold the applause for now. Imagine a chimera with a brain made up of human neurons which expressed human genes. Would organ procurement without consent be okay? That troubling possibility raises  questions about whether manufacturing chimeras with human-like properties for organs is even appropriate in the first place. Here’s what University of Montreal bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky told the Washington Post:

“I think the point of these papers is sort of a proof of principle, showing that what researchers intend to achieve with human-non-human chimeras might be possible … The more you can show that it stands to produce something that will actually save lives … the more we can demonstrate that the benefit is real, tangible and probable — overall it shifts the scale of risk-benefit assessment, potentially in favor of pursuing research and away from those concerns that are more philosophical and conceptual.”

I respectfully disagree. Saving more lives, of course, is good. Basic science is also valuable – even more so if it might translate to the bedside. This line of research, though, is positioned to upend our entire system of transplantation, and so its implications go beyond organ supply. In this post I will argue that to assess this technology’s implications for organ procurement in particular, there is good reason to focus on harms, not benefits. Read More