Organ transplants are fraught with danger. But even so, recipients are always willing to sign 'high-risk' waivers. They can specify that they don't want smokers' lungs, but they never do. Even just a year with a smoker's lungs is more attractive than another day with their own.

How do smokers' lungs get into a transplant program? Generally the donor's family denies that their deceased relative smokes. The harvesting surgeon can reject the lungs when he sees them, but the damage may not be readily apparent. The receiving surgeon can reject them too, but he has an anesthetized patient with an open chest on the OR table (who has generally signed a high-risk waiver) and he doesn't look fo...

Organ transplants are fraught with danger. But even so, recipients are always willing to sign 'high-risk' waivers. They can specify that they don't want smokers' lungs, but they never do. Even just a year with a smoker's lungs is more attractive than another day with their own.

How do smokers' lungs get into a transplant program? Generally the donor's family denies that their deceased relative smokes. The harvesting surgeon can reject the lungs when he sees them, but the damage may not be readily apparent. The receiving surgeon can reject them too, but he has an anesthetized patient with an open chest on the OR table (who has generally signed a high-risk waiver) and he doesn't look forward to telling the patient that he had surgery for nothing and may stillbe on a ventilator for several more weeks.

What about cancer? When a patient dies of cancer, he is not acceptable as an organ donor, but sometimes cancer has not been diagnosed and the tumors are not yet visible or palpable. Sometimes a recipient faces significant cancer problems tracable to a donated organ.

Even when everything seems perfect, a patient's body can reject the new organ. Acute rejection can result in months of hospitalization with a poor prognosis, just praying that he can get another organ before his body shuts down.

The bottom line is that whatever the risk, the organ recipient embraces it rather have to live another day or week with the damaged organ he now has, which can bring his own death any day.

Yes, some recipients die from tainted organs transplanted into their bodies. In the ideal, even one death is too many. But when you look at the stats, the typical organ recipient has years added to his life -- years of relatively good quality, instead of the tortured daily existence he'd have with no transplant.

Many have smokers' lungs and are thrilled that they got something instead of nothing.

The soldier who died is unfortunate, but this does not condemn the system we have.