I've lost a number of recent posts for some reason over the last few days including those on Nietzsche's Human, All too Human. Bandwith problems apparently. One of the lost posts was on Ian Hacking's review of Lesley Sharp's Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies and the Transformed Self in the London Review of Books. In this review Hacking says:

Thanks to its own success, organ transfer is in crisis: there are not enough donors. In the UK, four hundred people are said to die each year for lack of organs; many more wait endlessly, in states ranging from ill-health to agony. Hence the dubious trade in which a rich person goes to poor countries to buy a kidney from a very poor man whose aftercare is horrendous and whose life after donation will be one of illness. Hence the use of body parts from executed criminals. These are both facts of contemporary life. The first is shameful; the second case is more complicated. I am totally opposed to the execution of human beings, but I can’t see the harm in reusing their body parts. Then there are the horror stories of unwanted prisoners deliberately executed for organ harvesting.

How do we get more organs? First, by relaxing standards. Donors deemed to be at risk for such transmissible diseases as hepatitis used to be excluded. No donor over 70 was considered. Today, in the US, if the recipient is willing to accept the risk, such donors are accepted; better risk being sick than dead. Second, by allowing donations from non-heart-beating donors – a practice now spreading from Spain to other countries. Third, through the use of new technologies. Research is currently being conducted into the use of electromechanical organs, and organs from other species.

Hacking asks: should we aim at making cyborgs: humans with, say, implanted electromechanical pumps called artificial hearts? Or should we focus on hybrids: humans with, say, hearts transplanted from pigs? Pigs are considered more promising as donors than simians: proximity on the evolutionary tree is less important than structural and functional parallels, so long as the rejection problems can be solved. Engineering design comes first; biochemistry resolves the side effects.

He says that Sharp reports that, for this reason, expert opinion is quite strongly in favour of hybrids over cyborgs. Better to use an organ where most of the design problems have been worked out in the course of mammalian evolution, than to play God or Darwin and try to do it ourselves by imitating the real thing.