A small but growing number of people have donated kidneys to strangers, a development that could help ease the nation's shortage of transplant organs but also forces doctors to confront new ethical problems.
Experts say some people had been asking for decades about giving a kidney to anyone who needed it.
But doctors hadn't even considered allowing it until recently, when they discovered that donations from spouses and friends worked better than kidneys from cadavers. Two articles in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine explore the issue, with a kidney specialist warning in an editorial that competition for the organs could tempt hospitals to pay potential donors or relax selection standards. An article written by Dr. Arthur Matas, head of the University of Minnesota program that last year pioneered the use of organs donated by strangers, describes its success. Seven transplants were performed there last year using kidneys from people who did not know the patient. Nearly 12,500 kidney transplants were performed last year, with 4,153 of the kidneys coming from living donors.