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Genetic Linkage

‘Voluntary Euthanasia’: Are We Ready to Harvest Organs While Donors Are Still Alive?

In the dystopian society of Nobel prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, cloned people are raised to provide organs for the wealthy.

So stark and terrifying is Ishiguro’s imagined world that I never thought I’d read something similar in a work of nonfiction, let alone in a top medical journal. But a Perspective in the September 6 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), "Voluntary Euthanasia – Implications for Organ Donation," eerily echoes some aspects of the 2005 novel (and forgettable 2010 film): choosing to donate one’s organs before death, minus the coercion and cloning.

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