They are the sort of people who volunteer at the soup kitchen and don't expect to be congratulated. Who donate their blood and time and money and don't need any thanks. People who don't want a movie deal or even a mention in the local newspaper.
And now they are stepping forward to give a part of themselves--literally--to someone who needs it more.
"To do something unconditional, that's what I was looking for," says a New England schoolteacher who this year became one of the first people in the country to voluntarily donate an organ--one of his kidneys--to a complete stranger.
He wants to remain anonymous, he says, "because it was meant to be an anonymous gift. It's done, and I honestly don't want to hear from the recipient."
Until very recently, transplant centers turned away such people on principle. Doing surgery on a healthy person violates a doctor's professional oath: First, do no harm. "And there was also the concern that these people might be crazy," says Dr. Alan Wilkinson, director of the kidney transplant program at UCLA School of Medicine. "So we were very reluctant to take them."
But the reluctance is dissolving fast. The University of Minnesota established a program for non-directed (i.e., anonymous) kidney donation last year and since has evaluated about 20 donors and performed seven transplants, including the schoolteacher's. The Washington Regional Transplantation Consortium, which coordinates transplants in the Washington, D.C., area, now has several people who are willing to donate anonymously.
And doctors at many of the country's top transplant centers are debating the idea of openly welcoming and evaluating Good Samaritan donors.
"I think we'll be surprised at the number of people who come forward," says Wilkinson, who supports such an option at UCLA.
The reasons are simple. Waiting lists for organs swell by the thousands each year, and the supply from cadavers has reached a plateau. In 1999, for instance, fewer than a third of the 44,000 people waiting for a kidney got one, and 2,969 died waiting.
At the same time, doctors have become better at performing and managing transplants. For kidney transplantation, the most common procedure, they now routinely take organs from genetically unrelated donors, such as spouses and friends. Once rare, such living unrelated donors now account for about 15% of kidney transplants from living donors.
