Springs man joins fight to allow compensation for bone-marrow donors

For most people, it wouldn’t matter much whether you called bone marrow an organ, as it’s medically classified, or a bodily fluid, which is what it looks like.

But that distinction is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles this week by a group that includes a Colorado Springs cancer patient. If they win, they hope to bring more bone marrow donors to the table by being able to compensate them.

Colorado Springs freelance writer Mike Hamel, who is battling lymphoma, is among half a dozen people who want to get bone marrow removed from the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, which makes it a felony to buy or sell organs. They contend that bone marrow, which can be replenished, belongs in the company of plasma, sperm or eggs, all of which legally can be sold, rather than kidneys, lungs and livers.

They are represented by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that seeks out Constitutional issues to take on.

The suit was filed against U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on the grounds that when it comes to bone marrow, enforcing the 25-year-old law is unconstitutional. Other plaintiffs in the suit are several parents of children in need of bone marrow transplants.

The lawsuit, though, is a means to an end, Hamel said. He and the other plaintiffs have formed a nonprofit, More Marrow Donors, to create a pilot program to make charitable contributions available to donors in hopes of encouraging people to give.

There are about 7 million bone marrow donors in the U.S., but matching a recipient to a donor is difficult. The law firm says 1,000 Americans die each year because they can’t find a donor. Finding a match can be almost impossible for some minority groups.

Hamel and others say they are not out to create a marketplace for marrow, but to offset hardships or reward people for their effort. Payments might come as a college scholarship or mortgage assistance, for example.

But most of the medical community won’t set foot on that slippery slope.

“The weight of the expert community and advocates is going to be against it,” said Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. “People might see it as more benign (than other organ donations), but a bad precedent that they’d oppose.”

One opponent is Dr. Choon Kee Lee, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a bone marrow transplant doctor at the University of Colorado Hospital.

“It’s a completely misguided idea,” Lee said. “The idea that we’re going to commercialize the use of human organ, whether marrow stem cells or kidneys or lungs or what have you, I think is a pretty dangerous one.”

He said millions of people already donate altruistically, and adding money to the equation adds an element of exploitation and corruption.

But Institute for Justice attorney Bob McNamara argues that bone marrow was only added to the 1984 law because Congress didn’t know what it was. He points to a report from that time specifying that renewable tissues such as blood should not be included.

“It’s entirely obvious that Congress just didn’t understand what bone marrow is,” he said.

Hamel, who was diagnosed with lymphoma in June 2008, was treated with his own bone marrow. But such treatment only works half the time. His prognosis so far is good, but there’s a chance he might someday have to rely on another donor.

The suit probably won’t be resolved anytime soon, but in the meantime, the group hopes to draw publicity to its cause.

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