How One Father Created an Organ Empire

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/us/national-kidney-registry-paired-organ-donation.html

https://archive.ph/xp2VL

How One Father Created an Organ Empire
The National Kidney Registry has matched thousands of kidney donors with recipients. It has also paid millions of dollars to a company owned by its founder.
By Danielle Ivory, Grace Ashford and Robert Gebeloff
Dec. 27, 2025

The worst moment of Garet Hil’s life, he once said, came when he discovered he couldn’t donate a kidney to his sick 10-year-old daughter. By the time the girl found a match a couple of months later, Mr. Hil, an entrepreneur, had drawn up plans to transform the world of living organ donation.

His organization, the National Kidney Registry, started in 2007 with a simple idea: Donors who are incompatible with sick loved ones give their kidneys to a nationwide pool. The sick patients tap into that pool of strangers to find matches more quickly.

Since its founding, N.K.R. has enabled nearly 12,000 such swaps, called paired donations, far more than any other public or private program. The organization’s focus on technology and efficiency has jolted a sluggish system, many health experts said.

But at the same time, N.K.R. has created a multimillion-dollar business with considerable power over the flow of thousands of organs, according to interviews with more than 100 people in transplant medicine and a review of business records. Many doctors told The Times the stakes of these lifesaving exchanges were too high to be managed by a private company with little government oversight.

As N.K.R. has grown, it has charged hospitals steep fees for access to its registry of donors. Some of that cost is passed on to taxpayers through Medicare.

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[UpInArms]

1. The greed mantra that started under Raygun

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The world risks forgetting one of humanity’s greatest triumphs as polio nears global eradication − 70 years after Jonas Salk developed the vaccine in a Pittsburgh lab

It was like a horror movie. The invisible polio virus would strike, leaving young children on crutches, in wheelchairs or in a dreaded “iron lung” ventilator. Each summer, the fear was so great that public pools and movie theaters closed. Parents canceled birthday parties, afraid their child might be the next victim. A U.S. president paralyzed by polio called for Americans to send dimes to the White House to support the nonprofit National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his lawyer, Basil O’Connor. Celebrities from Lucille Ball to Elvis were enlisted to promote this “March of Dimes,” and mothers went door to door raising funds to conquer this dreaded disease.

Some of those funds went to 33-year-old scientist Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh, where they worked in a lab between a morgue and a darkroom to develop the world’s first successful polio vaccine.

To prove it worked, the experimental vaccine was tested on Pittsburgh schoolchildren and then 1.8 million children from around the country as part of the largest medical field trial in history. On April 12, 1955, when the Salk polio vaccine was declared “safe and effective,” church bells rang out, kids were let out of school, and headlines around the world celebrated the victory over polio.

When asked whether he was going to patent the vaccine, Salk told journalist Edward R. Murrow it belonged to the people and would be like “patenting the sun.”

(Bolding mine)