CHRISTINE COX, a New Scientist reader, writes to me suggesting that
if “elective ventilation”—attaching brain-dead people to respirators to
supply oxygen to their organs for a few extra hours—was legalised and
widely used, far more organs would be saved for transplant. I asked health
minister Lord Hunt for his view.
Hunt, a former senior hospital administrator,
said that the technique was first used in the late 1980s but was widely
considered controversial and ethically questionable. A report from a working
party of the British Transplantation Society showed that nationally only 3.3 per
cent of organ donations resulted from…
