Organ Shortage Quotes

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

The self-driving car is coming. And right now, our best supply of organs come from car accidents... Once we have self-driving cars, we can actually reduce the number of accidents, but the next problem then would be organ replacement.

I often ask people if they would like to give their organs when they pass on, and they say "Well, I'm not so sure, I don't know." And I said, "Well, would you accept one if you needed one?" "Well, yeah, sure." And I say "Well, there you go - where do you get them from?".

In China, people are selling their kidney to buy an iPhone 6. What's going to happen when the iPhone 7 comes out?

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

The difficulty of finding organs suitable for transplantation on man must be met.

Pretty much everybody knows there are not enough organs for all of those patients who need to get transplants, and what happens is, is that organs are actually directed in liver transplantation to those patients who are the sickest. So the patients who have the greatest chance of dying in the next three months or so are the ones who get the priority for the liver transplant.

If we had enough cadaver organs to go around we wouldn't do living donor liver transplants because one is we don't want to put a donor at risk, but the second is that it's a more difficult surgery for the recipient because you're getting a piece of a liver rather than a whole liver. It takes you longer to recover, and it has more complications related to where we sew together the blood vessels and the bile ducts.

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

A lot of people want to donate a kidney, but they're not in a position to because they have health issues of their own, and a lot of people need them. That's why the list is long and it takes a long time.