Kidney Chains

In our film, Kindness Is Contagious, we profile Daria Mabra, who donated a Kidney to her next door neighbor who she hardly knew. This introduced me to the concept of kidney chains (although Daria’s altruism was not a true Kidney chain).

A kidney Chain starts with an altruistic donor – someone who wants to donate a kidney out of the goodness of his or her heart. That kidney is transplanted into a recipient who had a donor willing to give a kidney, but was not a match. To keep the chain going, the incompatible donor gives a kidney to a patient unknown to him or her who has been identified as a match, essentially “paying it forward.” A specialized computer program matches donors and recipients across the country.

I love this concept as it exemplifies how kindness leads to success in the most basic way, by giving life. It also shows in a real world environment how a group of people are better off by virtue of kindness and cooperation.

One of the things people have noticed that although it is sometimes the case in a single group that altruists tend to do worse than people who aren’t altruistic, whenever you have more than one group, groups that have altruists in them tend to do much better than the group that have only selfish people in them and so between groups, the groups with more altruists tend to win.

-James Fowler

Lastly, if anyone wants to get involved in a Kidney chain, CLICK HERE for more information.

Via UCLA Health.