A brief history of deceased organ donation in one career--Howard Nathan retires

Organ donation and transplantation is still new enough that significant parts of its history can have been experienced in one career.  The WSJ reports on Howard Nathan's retirement from the Gift of Life Organ Procurement Organization, which he joined in 1978:

Howard Nathan Spent Decades ‘On Call’ for Organ Transplants. The CEO of the Gift of Life Donor Program is stepping down after a long career connecting organ donors with patients in need.  By Emily Bobrow

"When Mr. Nathan, 68, first joined the nonprofit that would become Gift of Life, he was one of three employees. Working around the clock, he traveled to hospitals in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey for hard conversations with grieving families and then made calls to surgeons in the hope of matching a donated organ with a waiting patient. “We would be driving on the Turnpike with a kidney in the car at three in the morning,” Mr. Nathan recalls on a video call from Gift of Life headquarters in central Philadelphia. “In the early days we had to make it up as we went along.”

"In 1994 he helped to draft Pennsylvania’s landmark organ donation law, which mandated that hospitals call organ-procurement organizations whenever a patient died. “Hospitals used to call when they wanted to. We were like Maytag repairmen waiting by the phone,” Mr. Nathan remembers. The law, which included funds for public-awareness campaigns and gave people a chance to register as organ donors when getting or renewing a driver’s license, increased donations by 43% in three years, he says. It became the model for a federal law in 1998.

...

"Brain death was a fairly new concept when Mr. Nathan first worked as an organ-donation coordinator—a job held by maybe 200 people around the country at the time. “We really had to teach and train people in the medical and legal aspects of donation,” he says.

...

"When Mr. Nathan entered the field, the success rate for transplants hovered at 30-35%. With the discovery in the early 1980s of immunosuppressant drugs, which curb the body’s natural rejection of foreign body parts, success rates have climbed above 90%."

HT: Frank McCormick