Racism reared its ugly head in an incident in the U.K, involving a donor family who insisted that the donated organ should go only to white patient and not to a “coloured” person. Shockingly, the kidney was accepted on those terms and transplanted into a white patient. The incident occurred at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, where the donor died. The organ was sent to the national transplant service, which matches organs to donors. The organ was then sent to a hospital for transplant, with information about the conditions that had been attached to it.

The Government has ordered an enquiry into the incident. A government statement said it was totally against any conditions being attached to organ transplants, adding that, “Donated organs are a national resource which is available to people regardless of race, religion, age or other circumstances”

The incident has caused anger and outrage among Britain’s ethnic minorities as well as the medical profession. Mr. Bernie Grant, a black M.P. described it as “an outrage of enormous proportions”, while Mr. Makbool Javaid, an official in a race relations forum, said it was the “worst form of discrimination one could imagine…You’re dealing with people in desperate need suffering from life-threatening illnesses. It means that someone’s life may not have been saved because of their race”.

Doctors have condemned this as well. A pioneering heart transplant surgeon, Sir Roy Calne, said,”An organ should be given regardless of race, colour or religion, no matter where it comes from”. Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of the ethics committee of the British Medical Association, said that the whole concept of transplant donation was altruistic – a gift to another with no strings attached, The incident, however, does focus attention on the ethical dilemmas that doctors could face when given organs with racist or other conditions attached. There is an acute shortage of organs in Britain, with an estimated 6,000 people waiting for different kinds of transplants. In these circumstances, refusing to accept organ donations – if, they have conditions attached, could pose a problem. If, for example, a white man died after specifying that his organs could only be given to whites and there were several white patients waiting, hospitals would be in the uncomfortable positions of refusing an organ and knowing that potential recipients were being denied treatment. A Catch 22 situation, if ever there was one.