More Brains Needed 232
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that more people need to donate their brains to medical research if cures for diseases like dementia are to be found and are urging healthy people as well as those with brain disorders to become donors. 'For autism, we only have maybe 15 or 20 brains that have been donated that we can do our research on. That is drastically awful,' said Dr Payam Rezaie of the Neuropathology Research Laboratory at the Open University. 'We would need at least 100 cases to get meaningful data. A lot of research is being hindered by this restriction.' Part of the problem, according to Professor Margaret Esiri at the University of Oxford, may be that people are reluctant to donate their brains because they see the organ as the basis of their identity. 'It used to be other parts of the body that we thought were important,' says Esin. 'But now people realize that their brain is the crucial thing that gives them their mind and their self.' Dr Kieran Breen, of the Parkinson's Disease Society, said over 90% of the brains in their bank at Imperial College London were from patients, with the remaining 10% of 'healthy' brains donated by friends or relatives of patients. 'Some people are under the impression that if they sign up for a donor card that will include donating their brain for research. But it won't,' says Breen. 'Donor cards are about donating organs for transplant, not for medical science.'"
No way (Score:4, Interesting)
Ethics, line 1... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have known several nurses, and many more in the helping professions, and their advice has been universally the same to me: Never get an organ donor card. Never. This is for two reasons. The first is that there is a huge shortage of tissue across the board. The second is that most of the hospital staff knows this and they aren't going to work as hard to save your life if you've got one of those organ donor cards. My friends have actually overheard doctors talking and saying to the effect of -- "Well, he kinda screwed himself here, hitting that other car head on at 80 MPH. Damn drunk. We could spend $40k in surgery on a 1 in 7 chance that he'll survive, or we can take his organs now and be 85% sure it was the right choice to make. And the surgeon's already put fifteen hours in today! I don't want to be the one to tell him he's got another four hours before he can go home for this bonehead..."
These people make triage decisions every day. Don't take this personally, but you aren't a person laying on the table but a machine that's broken. You're just like a thousand other lumps of flesh that come through the doors every day. Don't think you're special. Do. Not. Real life is not like those campy medical/reality TV shows you laugh along with. There are no witty one liners, there is no epic drama where the doctor comes in and realizes it's some rare disease from bum fuck egypt with a cursory glance. There's just a lot of really tired people with a dark and dry sense of humor, who live on caffeine, try not to make any big mistakes, and hope their significant other will put up with the long hours and 4am emergency pages for just a few more years until they pay off their student loans.
That doesn't mean they don't care, or that they're ghoulish devils come to suck your precious organs. But it does mean-- don't put that sticker on your license. They don't know you. They don't care. There's a thousand other people behind you and a thousand more ahead of you and they have a job to do. No. I'm not lying. No this isn't an urban legend. No I didn't hear this from a friend of a friend, I heard this directly from the mouths of the people who can point out names and faces of the people who have said stuff like this--Just so we're clear. I'm not trying to scare you, I have no hidden agenda. If you really want to be an organ donor, tell your friends and family, have it in your will, tell them where it is, and make sure they're clear that it's what you really want and you'll come back and haunt their ass if they don't make your last requests. Just don't put it on your license.
Re:Over my dead body! (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not like it's going to be much to use to me. Just hoping they'll still be around, since I'm hoping it'll still be some way off.
Re:To be fair.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a PhD and autism, so that makes me autistic but not stupid. Simon Baron-Cohen, a autism researcher, has expressed his worry that "curing" autism could reduce the number people studying maths and other professions that require good systematizing ability, a strength possessed by people with autism. Here is his comment on the BBC website...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7736196.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I agree that the way to discourage curing autism, at least getting people to consider its wider implications that go beyond autism, is to connect the search into a cure with the search for genes that code for personality traits.
It is known that people with Autism and Asperger's are far more likely to vote in certain political directions and express a different degree of religiosity, so we are looking at personalty traits - of all people not just autistic people - when we look for a cure. It is scary stuff, the general public does not understand the ethics or its wider implications.
Re:Ethics, line 1... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ethics, line 1... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is (roughly) the idea behind LifeSharers. Personally I think this is exactly the way to go:
http://www.lifesharers.com/ [lifesharers.com]