Giving a kidney to a stranger? Researchers call it ‘extraordinary altruism’

Renee Bruens of Clarksville, Tenn., was 33 years old — a wife and mother of two young boys — when a walk through a local parking lot changed her life.

“I pass this car that has a magnet on his driver’s side door, and it said, ‘O-negative type blood, kidney donor needed. Call this number,'” Bruens says. “And I was like, ‘I, in fact, I have O-negative blood.'”

Bruens snapped a photo of the magnetic sign and carried on with the day’s business. She says she gave it little more thought until the following day. On a break at work, she began scrolling through the pictures on her phone and the photo popped up.

“I tell somebody at work and they’re like, ‘You’re crazy,'” says Bruens. “But I just figured I’d go ahead and … just do the initial testing and if that’s a match, then I feel like it’s meant to be.”

Only about 300 to 400 Americans a year donate a kidney to someone they don’t know. It is an act that qualifies as “extraordinary altruism,” says Abigail Marsh, who studies altruism as a neuroscientist at Georgetown University.

Bruens, it turned out, was a perfect match for the man whose car magnet she’d seen. And after learning that a healthy person needs only one functioning kidney to thrive, she was sold. But her family? Not so much, she says.

“That’s the craziest part about it was really convincing everyone else,” says Bruens, who is now 39. “I already knew this is what I wanted to do. But it’s getting everyone else on board.”

Kidney donation typically involves laparoscopic surgery and is considered relatively low risk. Still, complications, including infection and blood clots, can happen.

Uncommon generosity

Marsh, the neuroscientist, says giving an organ to a complete stranger requires an uncommon level of generosity.

“Extraordinary altruism, I define as altruism that is usually very risky or costly and is not normative,” Marsh says. “It’s something you very rarely see people engage in.”

Marsh first began studying altruistic kidney donors in 2010. Her interest stemmed from her earlier research on psychopathy — the personality disorder characterized by antisocial behaviors including callousness and lack of empathy, or the inability to understand and feel another’s emotions.

“We know psychopathy is a spectrum,” Marsh says. “And I started thinking … if you’ve got very psychopathic people on one end, I wonder what the opposite of that could be?”

Thus began her brain-imaging studies of extraordinary altruists. Marsh’s early research found the size of their right amygdala — a region in the brain that processes emotions — to be larger than average, suggesting a greater capacity for empathy.

“We’ve done other research that’s shown that altruistic kidney donors are more empathic to other people’s pain,” she says. “The patterns of brain activity we see when they are experiencing pain look very similar to the patterns when they’re watching a stranger experiencing pain.”

And it’s the feeling they have when they witness strangers in pain that distinguishes them from most people. Extraordinary altruists care deeply about the welfare of others — including those who have no connection to them.

“And the behavioral research we’ve done suggests that that is because they are actually less selfish,” Marsh says.

The gift of life — twice

And then there are those who take their altruism a step further by becoming two-time organ donors.

Tom O’Driscoll, 60, of Sugarland, Texas, is one of very few Americans who has donated organs to two different people.

“In 2010, I donated my left kidney to a stranger at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles,” he says.

Then, two years ago, O’Driscoll donated 60% of his liver — an organ that regenerates itself to its original size and capacity — to help save a different person he didn’t know.

Liver donation surgery is more invasive than kidney surgery. It involves open surgery and five to seven days in the hospital. Recovery can take up to eight weeks — about the same time it takes for the donor liver to grow back.

O’Driscoll says his reason for donating to two strangers is simple.

“The need is very, very great,” he says. “There are over 100,000 Americans currently on the list waiting for a kidney or a liver and approximately 17 Americans die every day for want of an organ.”

O’Driscoll says his ability to donate healthy organs has given important purpose to the years spent keeping himself in top shape as a triathlete. And as he’s quick to tell anyone who asks, organ donation has not stopped him from competing.

“I’ve done all 10 of my Ironman races with one kidney and I’ve done my 10th one nine months after my liver donation surgery,” he says.

But best of all, O’Driscoll says, is the “quiet satisfaction of knowing you saved another human life.”

“That’s something I wouldn’t give up for the world,” he says.