The Greenwall Foundation
SPOTLIGHT ARTICLES
Interdisciplinary Program in Bioethics
June 2009
Mark Siegler, MD, Professor of Medicine, University of Chicago, was awarded a grant in the amount of $50,000, to support the project, Surgical Patients as Living Organ Donors: A Clinical and Ethical Innovation.
A research team at The University of Chicago is developing an entirely new model for living organ donation, a model that would ask elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy patients to become volunteer, unrelated living kidney donors. In this approach, the donor would be a surgical patient first and a living donor second, in contrast to the current system which “creates” a surgical patient by operating on a previously healthy individual. The proposed approach – if successful – has the potential to decrease the survival risks to living organ donors, address the long-standing ethical critique of living donation (that it violates the “do not harm” rule), and increase the supply of kidneys available for transplantation. Moreover, given the large number of elective abdominal procedures performed each year in the United States, this approach has the potential to substantially reduce, if not eliminate, the shortage of many abdominal organs for transplantation.
This novel concept raises a number of critical, unsettled questions related to both practice and ethics which the research team plans to address through a strategic case study of elective cholecystectomy patients who could, theoretically, serve as well-informed volunteer, unrelated living donors of kidneys.
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