Where Are All The Christians Hiding?

By Dr. W. Gifford Jones

October 4, 1992

"Where are all the good Christians hiding?" I recently posed this question in Paris, France, where I was attending the XIV International Congress of the Transplantation Society. I was in Paris to interview Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, Director of the Transplant Institute of the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Starzl had just made headlines around the world for transplanting the first baboon liver into a human. But what's the connection between a baboon's liver, Christianity and Dr. Starzl? And how would a Professor of Law correct a gross human injustice?

Dr. Starzl has performed an epoch-making operation. But it's historical significance was diminished by criticism from animal rights groups and some international journalists attending the Congress. The outcry was, "Why sacrifice a baboon?" Devout Christians should be the ones to answer this question.

One fact was apparent at the meeting. Human organs of any type are hard to find. Currently there are 25,000 people in the U.S. waiting patiently for a donor kidney. Others desperately need hearts, lungs, corneas and livers.

Why the shortage? Simply because day after day human organs are placed in expensive caskets and buried or burned. This has always seemed to me to be a terrible waste and most "Unchristian".

I'm not a theologian. But I recall being taught as a child that on death only the soul goes to Heaven. So why are devout Christians so adamant that the dead body must remain intact? Or such hypocrites that they deny their kidneys and livers to restore the health of a fellow man?

Who is to blame that the "Good Samaritan Principle" has fallen on hard times? If the ship QE 2 goes aground the captain must be blamed. If doctors practice fraudulent medicine they must be taken to task. So if Christians are phoney Samaritans, theologians are doing an inadequate job of teaching Christian theology. I'd say it's high time they spent one Sunday reminding their parishioners about the soul!

But I fear it's going to require more than a Sunday sermon before Christians decide to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So how can we take patients off kidney machines? Or provide hearts and livers before thousands more die? While in Paris I talked with Lloyd R. Cohen, Associate Professor at the Chicago Kent College of Law. He's been proposing for several years a financial futures market in cadaveric organs. Patients needing an organ would pay X dollars for it. The deceased person donating the kidney could will these funds to either his family or a charity.

Cohen says "people blanche at the thought of creating a market in so precious and sacred a thing as the human body, even a cadaver." But he urges opponents "not to be so delicate and prissy when people are dying for want of organs that are being fed to worms."

Critics say human life would be degraded by such flagrant commercialism. After all how could anyone be so crass as to place human organs along with pork bellies on the Chicago futures market?

Cohen retorts that "these poetic statements are the empty moral pieties of armchair philosophers incapable of reasonable balancing of human needs." He reminds his critics that the dead gain nothing by retaining their organs. And that markets almost everywhere are the most effective institutions for providing people with goods and services."

I believe Professor Cohen has a valid suggestion. But I think hell will freeze over before there's a futures market for organs in this country. The idea is too logical for North Americans to accept.

The only answer at the moment is the use of animal organs. In 1971 scientists at Sandoz Pharmaceutical discovered cyclosporin, a potent fungal extract. Just as the discovery of penicillin wiped out many infections, so cyclosporin has helped surgeons to fight organ rejection. It's taken human transplantation from a dream to a reality and now has set the stage for the transplantation of animal organs into man.

The use of animal organs will not please everyone. But for those who oppose baboon or other animal organs I have this suggestion. Attach yourself to a kidney machine several times a week to experience the pain, complications and inconvenience of existing this way. And would you rather see a young child die than live with an animal organ?

Next week, an interview with Dr. Thomas Starzl on why a 35 year old man needed a baboon's liver. Why research is being done on pigs. In the meantime everyone should ask "Where are all the good Christians hiding?"

W. Gifford-Jones M.D is the pen name of Dr. Ken Walker graduate of Harvard. Dr. Walker's website is: Docgiff.com

My book, �90 + How I Got There� can be obtained by sending $19.95 to:

Giff Holdings, 525 Balliol St, Unit # 6,Toronto, Ontario, M4S 1E1

Pre-2008 articles by Gifford Jones

Canada Free Press, CFP Editor Judi McLeod