ORGANS AREN'T FOR SALE; DONORS ARE NEEDED

The issue of human organ donations and transplants is just about as serious as any topic can be, particularly when a life is at stake.

Two recent incidents that are related only because they involve kidneys serve to illustrate the seriousness of organ donations.

The first incident involved an auction on the Internet. The attempted sale of a human kidney and the subsequent bidding on the eBay Web site turned out to be some kind of prank, but not before the ante went from a starting bid of $25,000 all the way up to $5.7 million.

It is illegal to sell human organs in this country, which should have made the eBay bidders suspicious from the start. The online prank may have served a purpose, however. Many Americans probably didn't know that selling an organ is against the law. Now they do.

Of all the transplantable organs, a kidney is the one that could most logically be sold by a living donor. Why? Because we humans have two kidneys, and one functioning kidney is all our body really needs. Countless individuals have given up a kidney for a family member in dire need, and that is perfectly legal. Family-member donations are often encouraged because of tissue matches that give such transplants a fairly high rate of success. No money changes hands in these instances, however.

There have been other bizarre stories about transplants. For example, there have been tales of individuals in need of a heart or other organ who made sizable "donations" to a hospital in order to get moved up on a waiting list.

It is thanks to the ability of modern medical miracles that anyone even has to think about the morals and ethics of human organ donations and transplants. A related issue is the debate over the potential to "grow" human organs from tissue samples. Or the use of fetal tissue and organs from aborted infants.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, there is another story about a kidney donation that reminds all of us there are plenty of people who do good just because -- well, because it's good.

A 50-year-old woman who became aware of the urgent nationwide need for kidney transplants offered -- anonymously -- one of her own healthy kidneys. Someone is headed for a normal life again thanks to this woman's generosity.

There are 42,000 people on waiting lists around the nation who need kidney transplants. In most cases, they will wait three to five years for a suitable donor. Clearly, this lifesaving technique depends on the availability of willing donors, most of whom have signed organ-donor cards like the consent on the back of every Missouri driver's license.