The surgical process depends upon which organs are being donated. The body is normally restored to as normal an appearance as possible, so that the family can proceed with funeral rites and either cremation or burial. The lungs are highly vulnerable to injury and thus the most difficult to preserve, with only 15–25% of donated organs utilized. History
The first living organ donor in a successful transplant was Ronald Lee Herrick (1931–2010), who donated a kidney to his identical twin brother in 1954. The lead surgeon, Joseph Murray, and the Nephrologist, John Merril won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 for advances in organ transplantation. The youngest organ donor was a baby with anencephaly, born in 2014, who lived for only 100 minutes and donated his kidneys to an adult with renal failure. The oldest known cornea donor was a 107-year-old Scottish woman, whose corneas were donated after her death in 2016. The oldest known organ donor for an internal organ was a 95-year-old West Virginia man, who donated his liver after he died.The oldest altruistic living organ donor was an 85-year-old woman in Britain, who donated a kidney to a stranger in 2014 after hearing how many people needed to receive a transplant.Researchers were able to develop a novel way to transplant human fetal kidneys into anephric rats to overcome a significant obstacle in impeding human fetal organ transplantations. The human fetal kidneys demonstrated both growth and function within the rats.
As opportunities to save lives increase with new technologies and procedures, the demand for organ donors rises faster than the actual number of donors. In order to respect individual autonomy, voluntary consent must be determined for the individuals disposition of their remains following death. There are two main methods for determining voluntary consent: "opt in" (only those who have given explicit consent are donors) and "opt out" (anyone who has not refused consent to donate is a donor). In terms of an opt-out or presumed consent system, it is assumed that individuals do intend to donate their organs to medical use when they expire. Opt-out legislative systems dramatically increase effective rates of consent for donation as a consequence of the default effect. For example, Germany, which uses an opt-in system, has an organ donation consent rate of 12% among its population, while Austria, a country with a very similar culture and economic development, but which uses an opt-out system, has a consent rate of 99.98%.Opt-out consent, otherwise known as "deemed" consent, support refers to the notion that the majority of people support organ donation, but only a small percentage of the population are actually registered, because they fail to go through the actual step of registration, even if they want to donate their organs at the time of death.