"Please don't take your organs to heaven," reads the American bumper sticker. "Heaven knows that we need them here on earth." Last year more than 7,000 Americans died while awaiting an organ transplant-almost double the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since 2003. In Europe, too, thousands of people whose lives could be extended or transformed (by having sight restored, for example) through transplants forfeit the opportunity for want of available organs.rnResearch by the World Health Organisation ("who) has found that only one in ten people in need of a new kidney, the body part most in demand, manages to get one. In the poorest places, of course, a complex transplant-which in the American health system costs $500,000-is unthinkable for most people anyway. But the gap between supply and demand for organs affects the poor too, by creating a market in body parts where abuses are rife.
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