Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, Wu's kidney specialist at UCLA, did not endorse her decision.
"I have concerns and suspicions about who those donors are and what consent might have been involved," he said, adding that he also had concerns about the quality of medical care.
The family paid about $40,000 for the surgery. It was told only that the donor was a 30-year-old male.
Dr. Lily Wu, who is the patient's daughter and a UCLA cancer researcher, said the surgeon had told her he was concerned about the future organ supply because the government was becoming more restrictive about the death penalty.
As a result, she suspected the kidney came from a prisoner. "I didn't want to know," she said.
Her mother said four other patients had been at the hospital recovering from kidney transplants, all of them from Taiwan, when she was there.
She flew back to California 12 days after the surgery.
"I am very happy with this transplant," she said Friday. "I got a good kidney."
A Chinese transplant doctor, Dr. Zhonghua Chen, said at a conference in Boston in July that Chinese doctors had transplanted 8,102 kidneys, 3,741 livers and 80 hearts in 2005.
Some experts estimate that well over 90% of all organs transplanted in China come from executed prisoners, given the limited supply of organs from other sources. China has no system of voluntary donor cards. Furthermore, experts say, because China defines death as a cessation in heart activity rather than brain-stem activity, there's little opportunity to recover organs from other sources.
A doctor at Beijing's prestigious Tongren Hospital, who gave only his family name of Wang, said Friday that until recently the hospital's bathrooms, tunnels and a nearby footbridge had numerous advertisements about buying and selling organs. Shortly after the new rules were announced, the hospital cleaned them up, he said.
On Friday, restrooms at Tongren boasted a new coat of light blue paint and newly installed plastic surfaces that could be easily washed or scraped clean.
Despite Beijing's record of denying the use of prisoners' organs, some Chinese defend the practice.
"It is understandable that China relies on organs of executed prisoners, given that voluntary organ donation is not well established in China," said the doctor at Tongren.
A patient agreed.
