Xeno-Transplantation

• Author: Alexandru Boroi
• Position: Faculty of Law, the Criminal Law Department Police Academy, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Bucharest, Romania
• Pages: 177-182

AGORA International Journal of Juridical Sciences, www.juridicalj ournal.univagora.ro

ISSN 1843-570X, E-ISSN 2067-7677

No.1 (2012), pp. 1-6

1

XENO-TRANSPLANTATION

Al. Boroi

Alexandru Boroi

Faculty of Law, the Criminal Law Department

Police Academy‚ Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Bucharest, Romania

*Correspondence: Alexandru Boroi, 11 Florilor St., sector 1, B ucharest

E-mail: alexandruboroi@yahoo.com

Abstract

The transplant has its own rules that are not suitable to follow the individual

destiny, aspiring to a bolish the intimate constrain ts of religious na ture, becoming a valuable

and sustainable activity, design by humans to save human’s life. Th e transplant becomes an

end in its self with a u tilitarian purpose, both from the biolo gical point of view, as

humanitarian one, consisting in the extension or salvation o f a human life.

Keywords: transplant, organs, tissues, donors.

Introduction

The transplant-type medical procedures save presently thousands of lives, but those

waiting in line for compatible organ s and tissues is bigger than the human donors

1

. The

transplant itself rises ethical problems, both in live donors version (in case of organs like

kidneys, or partially liver), and in donors being in brain death version

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.

With living donors there are suspicions regarding possible pressures from the

relatives of the potential receiver, arriving, in case of distant donors, to denunciation of

“traffic organs” fa cilitated by the financial pressures above the potential donors. In case of

brain death donors, the suspicion is m ainly related by their or relative’s consent, as wel l as

by the irreversible (or not) character of their condition.

Anyway, both organs offered by living donors, and those taken from p atients in

brain death are not enough to satisfy the transplant needs of a society where the waiting lists

are longer and longer

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.

A possible solution, still at the beginning of the tests on human sub jects, is

represented by cell, tissues and organs removal between species – named xeno-

transplantation, to differentiate it from allo-transplantation (the excha nge of tissues or

organs inside the same species). The transplantation of whole organs is realized with less

success than tissues or cells (the longest period of survival reported in kidney transplant

from chimpanzee to human if of 9 months, while in the case of h eart transplant, the life time

of the donor didn’t exceed 21 days), but the xeno-transplantation proc edures still remain

experimental.

1

A. Boroi, Infraciuni contra vieii, All Beck Publishing House, 1999, p. 41.

2

O. Ungureanu, Noile dispoziii legale privind prelevarea i transplantul de organe, esuturi i celule de origine

uman în scop terapeutic, “Dreptul” no. 5/2007, p. 17.

3

V. G. Cheung, Whole genome amplification using a d egenerate oligonucleotide primer allows hundreds of

genotipes to be performed on less than one nanogram of genonic DNA, Genetica, 1996, p. 32.