Walking the tightrope.

The third in a four-part series on the history of transplant surgery, setting out the controversies and ethical problems that arose from it, examining the personalities and rivalries involved in its development, and transplant surgeons' hopes for the next century. This part continues the story of the search for a means of preventing organ rejection in transplant surgery. The development of the immunosuppressant cyclosporin brought a dramatic increase in transplant surgery; this marked the beginning of the organ donor supply problem - were doctors unnecessarily prolonging lives in order to harvest organs? Anti-rejection drugs could cause distressing side-effects - this raised the problem of whether patients, especially children, were being subjected to unnecessary and pointless suffering, both from the drugs and from repeated transplant surgery (Laura Davies and Benito Agrello). Were patients being used for surgeons' experiments?