Another kidney

Thor Andersen is something of a pariah, or so you would think, to read the denunciations that have been heaped on his head recently. His actions, we were told, were ‘abhorrent’, their consequences ‘tragic’. He was conscienceless, selfish. How, wondered one commentator, did he sleep at night. What had he done, this dreadful specimen of humanity? Well, save his own life, actually.

Mr Andersen, a 33-year-old London-based property developer, had suffered complete kidney failure. For a year he had been on dialysis, which for those who don’t know is a kind of miserable half-life, requiring the patient to be connected to a machine three times a week for six hours at a stretch. Like thousands of others, he was the victim of society’s inability to provide sufficient organs for those who require transplants.

The problem is this. On the one hand, medicine has made more such operations possible; on the other, along with improved road safety, it is saving the lives of more of those who might otherwise have become post-mortem donors.