Name: 外科医だけど「移植手術」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T18:23:24.000Z
Duration: 19 min 34 s
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I'm Dr. Danae Simpson, abdominal transplant surgeon, and I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

At MrAnnie11 asks, how much do you think I can get for my kidneys?

In the United States, getting money or any other type of gift or coercion to donate is illegal.

You cannot get a raise, you can't get a brand new car, you can't get a house, you can't get a money gift to donate an organ.

We don't want people to feel pressured to donate their organs.

And actually, in the case of living donation, when a living donor comes forward to any transplant center thinking about donation, they actually have to meet separately with a psychiatrist and a living donor advocate to determine if there is any coercion going on behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, outside of the United States, that's not always true.

Coercion or even deception to donate organs is fairly common.

A Reddit user asks, how long does the process of liver transplant last from when the doctors decide to go the liver transplant route to the actual surgery?

Why does it always seem like we're rushing in the movies when we decide to go for a transplant?

Organs don't last forever, even when they're on ice.

There is a certain amount of time that we need to be working against to get that organ into a body, into a warm environment where oxygenated blood is flowing through that organ.

Otherwise, the organ starts to die and it's no longer usable.

That amount of time varies by organ, believe it or not.

Kidneys can stay out of the body on ice or on a pump machine, we'll get to that later, for up to 36, sometimes even 48 hours.

On the opposite end, however, hearts and lungs, only four to six hours.

Now I mentioned a pump and pump technology is changing the face of transplantation.

This is an exciting technology that kind of mimics being in a body.

So you can hook a liver, you can hook a heart or lungs up to this pump and blood is pumped through the organ, thereby extending the amount of time until we have to transplant it.

The Only Kid asks, if a body rejects an organ transplant, can that organ be used by someone else or is it no longer usable?

It's no longer usable because what rejection means is that our immune system attacks that organ and causes damage that makes it no longer usable.

Now, depending on the organ though, what we do with it varies.

With kidneys, we can just leave it there and then transplant a new kidney into a new spot.

You get your third kidney when you get your first transplant.

If you have rejection over time, you can get a fourth kidney, you can get a fifth.

I've had a patient who had six kidneys in his body.

Do donated organs age according to the donor's age or do they adapt to the age of the new body?

The age of the organ does matter somewhat.

So if you get an organ from a younger donor, you can expect the lifespan of that organ to maybe be a little bit longer, particularly in the case of organs that don't have the ability to heal themselves like the liver.

However, getting an organ from somebody who's very, very young does not mean that you get 20, 30 extra years on your life per se.

PWTI007 asks, is there an organ shortage?

When we think about all the number of people who need organ transplants and the number of people who are either willing to give organ transplants in living donation, which you can do with liver and kidney, or people who pass away and are donor designated on their driver's license, we don't have enough to go around.

In fact, there are over 100,000 men, women, and children currently awaiting an organ transplant.

Micah Fox-Long asks, how do organ transplants actually work?

How do we connect them to the body of the recipient?

I love this question because whenever I talk to my patients about transplant, I always say that I, as a surgeon, am basically a plumber.

If I were gonna take a sink and bring it into the room, it's not gonna work unless I connect it to pipes that bring water in and out of the sink, and a transplant is the same thing.

The red is the artery, the blue is the vein.

These bring oxygenated blood to the organ and deoxygenated blood away from the organ, and we need to connect those pipes in order for the organ to work.

And the third pipe we connect is the functional pipe of the organ.

In this case, it's the bile duct, which brings bile from the liver to the intestine, which helps us to digest our fatty foods.

And the way we connect them is with stitches.

We have to wear glasses with magnifying lenses on the end, and we will painstakingly but quickly sew those pipes together.

Saccharin 000 asks, I wanna ask my microbiology professor so badly if the fecal transplant episode of South Park is real, but I can't.

It's a poop transplant, believe it or not.

What this involves is taking fecal matter from a healthy individual that has all the good bacteria that we want in it and transplanting that into the intestine of someone who needs it.

So the case where this is often used is if someone has a really bad infection of their colon called C. diff.

And so Clostridium difficile is the bacterium there that causes a terrible, terrible infection in the colon that can sometimes result in the entire colon needing to be removed.

The way that C. diff. works is that it replaces all the good bacteria, essentially, in the colon.

So only the C. diff. are there, and they're just causing a mess.

To try to push those out, you wanna get good bacteria in there.

And so you basically, it's like a poop shake.

It gets put down into the intestine and does its job.

Self Manifesto asks, how do surgeons connect nerves to donated organs?

Well, for our solid organs, we actually don't, believe it or not.

And nerve regeneration will happen slowly over time.

And so solid organs refer to things like the liver, the kidney.

But when you're thinking about transplanting a limb, such as hand transplant or even face transplant, that is a case where nerve connection does become important.

SoupBullerChris asks, now that a penis transplant is a thing, can I get on that list?

I love my old penis, but it's retired and ready to move on.

You can't get a penis transplant just because you're tired of your old one.

The usual reason for a penis transplant is because there's been trauma to the penis that has required it to be removed, such as cancer or a burn or some other type of trauma.

At Last Thing You Forget asks, can I get a brain transplant?

Although brain transplant has yet to be successful, the nature of this question makes me think that maybe there is a pretty big need for brain transplant.

ChironXC asks, at what point will stem cell research just allow us to grow clones of our own organs for transplantation?

This would certainly solve our organ shortage issue.

The good news is, is that researchers are working on this every day.

I once worked with a researcher who was doing a lot of work in this area, and he had actually managed to grow a kidney with stem cells that made what we called bland urine.

And by bland urine, I mean just water, meaning the kidney's not doing the job to filter out any of the other toxins that it's supposed to.

So it didn't do all the functions that a kidney should do, but at the very least it was making some liquid, and that's mind boggling to me.

I've been told that organs that are grown with stem cells are just a few years off, but that was a few years ago.

A Quora user asks, what was the first human organ to be successfully transplanted?

In 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray did the first successful kidney transplant between two twin brothers in Boston, Massachusetts.

What I find really cool about this is that transplant is such a young field that I actually had the privilege of meeting Dr. Murray when I was a resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital, which is where he practiced and trained.

SacktheVignesh88 asks, what is xenotransplantation and what role is it going to play in the future?

Xenotransplantation is a fancy word for saying you're getting a transplant from some animal that is not a human.

And I do think that it has a big role for the future.

There is an organ shortage, so we have to find creative ways to solve that problem.

And xenotransplantation just may be the answer.

Ed Krasen asks, would you allow doctors to put a pig heart into your body?

If I was on death's door and I was not going to have an offer for a human heart anytime soon, yes.

Both kidneys and hearts have been successfully transplanted into humans.

However, long-term success still has not been shown.

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外科医だけど「移植手術」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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