A Members-Only Club for Organ Donors
June 14, 2006 — -- Dave Undis founded the nonprofit group LifeSharers in 2002 with the philosophy that a real incentive -- other than altruism -- was missing from organ donation.
Be willing to give -- and you shall receive, was his thinking.
"We offer people a really good trade: You agree to donate your organs when you're dead and they're no good to you anymore. In exchange, you move up the waiting list if you ever need a transplant to live," said Undis, who lives in Nashville, Tenn.
So far, 4,526 people from all 50 states have joined LifeSharers, pledging to donate their organs only to other members when they die. If there is no suitable match, a person's organs can be donated to a nonmember.
Undis believes restricting organs only to people who are willing to donate their own is the fairest way to distribute precious organs, while others balk at the notion.
As Dr. Douglas Hanto, chief of transplantation at Harvard Medical School, puts it, an organ "ought to go to the person dying in the ICU, not the person sitting at home with a LifeSharers club card."
Undis is quick to point out that LifeSharers is free and open to everyone. So far, 24 people waiting for organs have joined LifeSharers.
But despite Undis' efforts, so far there have been no transplants from one LifeSharers member to another, as no one has passed away under the right circumstances to donate (such as brain death after a car accident).
More than 92,000 Americans are waiting for life-saving organs on the official United Network for Organ Sharing -- UNOS -- waiting list. Seventeen people die each day waiting for an organ, according to UNOS.
Some people, like Undis, would like other options.
"When I was waiting on the list, I would probably wish there was a second group I could go to," said Howard Kindred Sr., a liver transplant recipient in 1995 and founder of a Pennsylvania transplant support group called NEPATSG. "My wife was on a roller coaster ride -- along with my son -- not knowing if I was going to live or die."
