Essay peeks at potential future of organ donation

Here’s a hypothetical conundrum.

It’s the year 2050. Like most humans, you bioengineer a pig that contains perfect matches of your organs. Your donor pig experiences kidney failure and needs surgery to maintain its reserve organs for you. Unfortunately, your insurance policy won’t cover pig transplants, so the pig dies with all your spare parts. Shortly thereafter, your own liver fails, and you die, too.

This is the basis for an essay that was written by Wayne State University research assistant, Mary Ann Krug, and published in the December 17, 1999 issue of the journal Science. It was part of a special series that asked readers to imagine what life would be like in the year 2050.

“My work with tissue culture got me thinking about the possibility of culturing organs for donation,” said Krug, who studies signal transduction in the lab of Dr. Hyeong-Reh Kim. She got the idea of animal donors at last year’s Dean’s Distinguished Lecture when Dr. Scott Campbell talked about his cloning work and the famed “Dolly” sheep.

She says she had fun writing the story, which points to the impact of evolving technology on society. “Experts may not understand all the possibilities of their technological advances, even though it seems clear-cut at the beginning,” Krug said. For that reason, she finds it difficult to think about the global impact of scientific work. “You just don’t know exactly what the future might hold,” she said.

Although she believes in vitro organ culturing will probably happen in the near future, Krug says it will probably be a labor intensive process. “Organ culturing has the potential to help many people in life-threatening situations,” she said. “I believe it’s a technology that’s worthy of development, but I’m sure there will be major problems along the way.”

Dr. Rafael Fridman heard about the contest and encouraged Krug to apply. “Her essay was chosen from hundreds of others,” he said. “She poses an interesting situation that could become a reality in this age of biomedical and technological advancements. It’s certainly something to consider.”