Welcome to part III of a series of posts highlighting discussions of organ donation on the Taboo Trades podcast. So far, I’ve discussed Imminent Death Donation, The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation, and Kidney To Share.
Today I want to highlight Kidneys and Challenge Trials with Josh Morrison. Like Martha Gershun, Josh donated his kidney to a stranger in 2011 when he was working as a corporate lawyer. Since then, he has founded the non-profits Waitlist Zero, which envisions an America where no one dies because of a shortage of transplantable kidneys, and 1 Day Sooner, an organization originally founded to advocate on behalf of Covid-19 challenge trial volunteers.
This was only the second episode of the podcast, recorded during covid shutdowns. As you’ll hear in the episode, I have the utmost admiration for Josh and the work that he’s done. Not content to save one person through his kidney donation, he has also dedicated his career to helping others through his education and advocacy groups.
Amazingly, Josh was inspired to become a kidney donor, in part, through an article written by Sally Satel, who has also been a guest on the podcast (I’ll discuss that episode in my next post):
[T]he emotional journey that Sally talked about really resonated with me because she had three different people say yes to donating and then back out. And you could just see the sort of loneliness of feeling like you need someone else to save you and not wanting to be a burden. And then just also how it just affects all of your social relationships. The person I donated to, we became friends afterward. And he told me he was on the waiting list for eight years, I believe, before he got a transplant. And he said that whenever he, you know, would see friends, which was kind of less and less often as the disease went on, he said it was like a dead body. The idea of living donation was like a dead body in the room where like they weren’t offering and like he wasn’t asking. And so that was something that really stuck out to me about what Sally wrote.
Listen to Kidneys and Challenge Trials here, or in the embedded player below (or on apple, Spotify, and the other usual suspects).