Strange Harvest
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Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor anonymity. As Sharp argues, new forms of embodied intimacy arise in response, and the riveting insights gleaned from her interviews, observations, and descriptions of donor memorials and other transplant events expose how patients and donor families make sense of the transfer of body parts from the dead to the living. For instance, all must grapple with complex yet contradictory clinical assertions of death as easily detectable and absolute; nevertheless, transplants are regularly celebrated as forms of rebirth, and donors as living on in others' bodies. New forms of sociality arise, too: recipients and donors' relatives may defy sanctions against communication, and through personal encounters strangers are transformed into kin. Sharp also considers current experimental research efforts to develop alternative sources for human parts, with prototypes ranging from genetically altered animals to sophisticated mechanical devices. These future trajectories generate intriguing responses among both scientists and transplant recipients as they consider how such alternatives might reshape established—yet unusual—forms of embodied intimacy.
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Strange Harvest
Organ Transplants, Denatured
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Final examples of responses to scarcity anxiety involve new forms of medical research and experimentation. These ultimately rely on new hybrids of the human body that extend well beyond allotransplantation, or the melding of human-to-human bodies and parts. Briefly, these sorts of hybrids include the development of mechanical and organic alternatives, which could either help bridge the gap while patients await organs of human origin or sidestep the human organ donor entirely. Among the most celebrated examples is the development of several models of mechanical heart, including the Jarvik-7 in the 1980s and, currently, the AbioCor and other recent total artificial heart (TAH) prototypes (ABC 1996; Gil 1989; Hamilton 2001; Plough 1986; Rowland 2001). Currently such devices ensure only very short-term success rates for patients who, as little more than human guinea pigs, inevitably die from a cascading set of serious medical complications. In short, at present medical science is unable to duplicate the long-term workings of our sophisticated organs. Implantable devices that help drive a failing heart, most notably left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) currently bear more promise. Yet another highly experimental domain of research is the realm of xenotransplantation, or the creation of hybrid animal species (especially simian and porcine) that bear human genetic material and might one day define a source of organs for human use. The obstacles to creating such viable designer creatures are immense, and the research is plagued by the immunological dangers associated with cross-species infection. Such dangers have defined a focus for heated debates within this country and even more so in England (Bach, Ivinson, and Weeramantry 2001; Birmingham 1999; Butler 1999a, 1999b; Clark 1999; Vanderpool 1999). Nevertheless, within the transplant community, experimental mechanical and organic alternatives are imagined as potentially viable—and highly profitable—solutions to the current scarcity of organs (Maeder and Ross 2002). The desire for alternatives that would eliminate the problem of organ scarcity is so strong in some professional quarters that discussions may skirt ethical and other inherent dangers associated with radical proposals.
Natural and Denatured Bodies
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