Organs For Sale?

     This post will address the ethical issues involved with legalizing organ sales in the United States, referencing a BBC News editorial by Martin Wilkinson, which can be found here.

     I believe that one's most fundamental right is ownership over one's own body, and based on this simple premise, I would argue that organ sales in the United States should by all means be legalized.  However, the situation is more complicated than a simple question of ownership.  If organ sales were legalized, the poor would have a means of attaining a monetary reward, but they might also be forced into unfair deals by the more wealthy, seeking to exploit their financial situation.  If sales were legalized, they would have to be tightly regulated.  Another question we must ask is: what will happen to organ donation if a price is being set on organs?  Organ sales will most likely provide a larger pool for transplants, but they may also raise the price, since families of the deceased may no longer allow clinics to harvest the organs for free.  The augmentation in the price of organ transplantation will be particularly drastic if there is only a small pool of people willing to sell their organs.  I am dubious that a large number of people will volunteer their organs in exchange for money, given how invasive a procedure is involved, meaning that the price of organs would skyrocket while the supply would not increase significantly.

      The article did not significantly change my opinion on whether or not organ sales should be legalized.  Yes, it has the potential to provide enough organs to clear the waiting lists for transplantation, and I do agree that the solution to regulating most underground markets (like the organ sales on black markets in other countries) is to legalize the product.  Overall, I do believe that organ sales should be legalized, but I foresee a flood of problems and ethical questions ensuing.  If the government chooses to legalize sales in the U.S., I hope that they will regulate the market very carefully.

Response: "Organs For Sale?" by Joe Boehrer

     This post is in response to Joe's post, which discusses the ethical controversy associated with legalizing organ sales in the United States and presents his thoughts on the matter.  Joe states his opinion early, saying, that one's organs are one's personal property and that people sell a myriad of other goods and services ranging from hair to sex.  He makes the point that one deserves compensation for the organs one has taken care of (if they have done so) and that, unlike organ donation, organ sales are made by a conscious human being.  He says that he supports the organ donation system in place, but believes that legalizing organ sales would ameliorate the shortage of organs available for transplants by greatly increasing supply.  Next, he makes the point that the poor would most likely be forced into unfair compensation, but says that the health care system is already plagued by this problem.  He ends by saying that he finds no problem in legalizing organ sales, although he thinks that organ donations from the deceased should continue to be free.  He references this article, which presents the advantages of legalizing organ sales.

     First of all, let me say that I do agree with Joe's standpoint that organ sales should be legalized, but not wholeheartedly.  I found that overall Joe effectively presented both sides of the argument, but dismissed the issues of legalizing organ sales too easily.  Early in his post, when he writes that people sell stranger things, from hair to sex, he floats over the issue that many people find organ sales to be repulsive and unethical.  If organ sale were legalized, there might be a very small pool of vendors, meaning that the organ supply problem would not be drastically improved.  Skirting over the objections to organ sale by saying that prostitution is worse does not remove the controversy any more than citing the death count of World War II would make the situation in Afghanistan seem pleasant.  Likewise, his dismissal of the potential problem of unfair compensation for the poor by saying that the health care system is already plagued by this problem does not effectively erase the issue.  At the end of his post, he states that organ donation from the deceased should continue to be free, but doesn't state why.  If organ sales are legalized, the families of the deceased will most likely look for compensation for the organs donated.

     Overall, I agree with Joe's view that organ sales should be legalized, but I would not be so quick to dismiss the issues that will ensue.  Joe, your article was credible and I thought you represented both sides effectively, if not fairly.  Here's the link to Joe's post.

Technorati: a search engine I had no idea existed until now

     This post will cover the functionality of Technorati, a search engine which only searches for blogs and related content.  I will search for the topic of my informative paper, which is on regenerative medicine, and in doing so explore Technorati's capabilities.

     Upon searching Technorati for the phrase "Regenerative Medicine" I found no results.  When I changed the query to "Stem Cell Regulations" however, I encountered a blog entitled: The Blog of Legal Times (or the BLT) which contained an article on the recent judiciary blocking of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.  The blog has many authors, but I will list all of them anyways: , Carrie Levine, David Brown, David Ingram, Diego Radzinschi, Jeff Jeffrey, Jenna Greene, Jordan Weissmann, Liz Engdahl, Marcia Coyle, Mike Scarcella, Tom Schoenburg, and Tony Mauro.  It appears that the blog has been active since February, 2007, and the authors make 4-8 blog posts daily.  The authors do use hyperlinks, usually linking to news articles from other websites.  They also use an abundance of pictures and some videos, which they procure from news stations as well.

The link to this blog can be found here

      I then searched the same query again and found another blog entitled "Daily KO's: This week in science" whose author goes under the blogging alias "DarkSyde."  This particular post was written on Sept. 11th, 2010 in response to the judiciary block on funding for embryonic stem cell research.  The tone of the post is drastically different from that of a research paper, it is laden with not only slang terms, but with personal bias as well.  This is apparent in sentences such as "we had all hoped we were past this insane stem cell crap."  One would never write this informally in a research paper, nor inject this sort of sneering bias into it, and I'm saying this as someone who supports embryonic stem cell research.

The link to this blog can be found here

Response: "Ethics and Medicine: Embryonic Stem Cells" by Eric Lardinois

     This is in response to Eric's post concerning the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the ethical debate surrounding this activity.  He begins the by stating the potential benefits some believe embryonic stem cell research can provide, focusing specifically on organ transplants.  He states that stem cells can provide patients with organ without any immune-rejection issues, which I have found in my experience to be a potential benefit widely toted by ES cell research advocates.
    
     The second paragraph goes on to explain the ethical questions stem cell research provokes.  He states that the main question in the controversy is whether or not an embryo constitutes a human life, and whether the benefits of embryonic stem cell research merit the sacrifice of a human embryo.  He goes on to say that both sides of this argument are well-supported, and that they seem to be in a stalemate.  He provides links to two websites, one arguing for embryonic stem cell research, and one against:
The article for ES cell research
The article against ES cell research

He states at the end that he finds the anti-research argument more compelling.

     I found Eric's post to be fair and unbiased, and I thought he used relevant, logical statements throughout the post as well.  His articles, however, did not do so in my opinion.  The article supporting stem cell research spent much of its time explaining strange applications of embryonic stem cell research, such as infecting fully-formed embryos with various diseases and observing the effects of such an action.  First of all, this would not be stem cell research, but human testing since the embryo would be whole, larger than a blastocyst (a 70 cell ball from which ES cells are harvested), and alive.  It is illegal to expressly infect a human being to test diseases, and I doubt any group would successfully obtain federal funding for such research.  It also argues that embryonic stem cell research reduces the scale of animal testing, which is unlikely since mice have been used as a human-similar test subject for decades.  Before human testing can be performed, research institutes must perform extensive animal testing to ensure safety, so embryonic stem cell research arguably increases the incidence of animal testing.  I felt that the article spent too much time covering obscure topics and not enough time focusing on relevant benefits of stem cell research.

     I found that the second article often used ridiculous hyperbole and its arguments were often very illogical.  The author of the said article at one point compared the extraction of stem cells from an embryo to lynching African Americans.  These two events have almost nothing to do with one another; lynching is a hate crime and a horrendous, inhuman act made expressly to kill another human for killing's sake, while harvesting the ES cells from an embryo is an act which transforms something that would be wasted into valuable medical science.  The author even went so far as to say that stem cell research will lead to the slaughter of newborn babies.  If there is this much opposition to the killing of a 70 cell cluster, there will be no newborn babies killed.

     This is not to say that many of the anti-ES research arguments are not compelling, their opinion is valid; I just thought the article Eric chose contained logical fallacies and too much hyperbole.  Personally, I believe that the death of a 70 cell human for stem cell research is more human than the slaughter of say, a calf (which has a nervous system) for veal.  Eric, kudos for your unbiased post, even though I don't agree with your articles.  Cheers!

Here's the link to Eric's article