genomeboy.com

Many people feel that it is a more elevated act to donate anonymously: not to pick a recipient, in other words, but simply to show up at a hospital and offer one’s kidney, leaving it to the transplant center to assign it to the next person on the list. Sometimes the recipients in these transactions choose not to meet their donors; sometimes they don’t even send a note to say thank you. For a donor to pick a recipient through a service like MatchingDonors can seem, from this perspective, like egotism—playing God by choosing who will live, and encouraging gratefulness by arranging for a relationship with the recipient. But, in a certain literal sense, a nondirected donation is not altruistic in a way that picking a recipient is, because there is no other there. There is no human story, just a principle; the only thing visible to the donor is his own shining deed.

Larissa MacFarquahar on kidney donation in the New Yorker (registration required). Wow. Best nonfiction I’ve read this year.