KIDNEY TRANSPLANT Donation comes via Web site

There are no laws against soliciting an organ donation.
DENVER (AP) -- Setting aside ethical concerns, surgeons completed a kidney transplant Wednesday in what is believed to be the first operation where the donor and recipient met through a commercial Web site.
The donor and recipient were doing well after the four-hour surgery, Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center spokeswoman Stephanie Lewis said.
Bob Hickey, who lives in a mountain town near Vail, had needed a transplant since 1999 because of kidney disease but had grown tired of being on the national waiting list. He met donor Rob Smitty of Chattanooga, Tenn., through MatchingDonors.com, for-profit Web site created in January to match donors and patients for a fee.
"Sitting on a waiting list and hoping for a new kidney for so long, your attention is attracted to anything that might help you," Hickey, a 58-year-old former executive at a health maintenance organization, said a few hours before the operation.
The transplant had been scheduled for Monday, but doctors called it off at the last moment to look into whether either Hickey or Smitty stood to profit from the arrangement. Both men said no money changed hands for the organ, which would violate federal law.
Concerns for ethics
Ethicists said they still have serious concerns about MatchingDonors.com and other organ donations between strangers.
There are no laws against soliciting an organ donation, and an increasing number of patients have turned to friends and family, or even casual acquaintances, for kidneys and pieces of liver.
By finding his own donor, Hickey bypassed the waiting list maintained by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit group that works under government contract to allocate all organs donated from the dead. It doles out organs, in part, according to which patients need them the most.
The network does not oversee the increasing number of live donors, such as Smitty. Last year, there were 6,920 living donors compared with 6,457 dead ones.