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{{trope}}
Organ donation is a noble thing. Lots of us have little cards that tell the doctors that if we have life rudely yoinked out from under our feet, they can take what's left of us to make sure that the same tragedy [[Billy Needs an Organ|doesn't befall someone else]]. Some forms of donation - like donating a kidney - can actually be done while still alive, which is just as brave, especially since you'll be pottering around the planet for years to come and are still willing to hand over an internal organ so that someone else can live.
Most of us agree though, that it is not something we would want to have forced on us while our hearts are still beating, thank you very much. At that point, the kind act of donation becomes little more than mutilation. Cue fiction.
This is a pretty legitimate source of angst for the character who's treated like a spare tyre (and usually with about as much consideration for their feelings), but it's also a pretty subtle type of psychological [[Body Horror]]. This is ''their'' body - the one they were born with, with all their own genetics and personality traits - but as far as the people around them are concerned, the Walking Transplant's very flesh and blood are the exclusive property of whoever they were created to be the donor for.
[[Fridge Logic]] begins to creep in once you remember the time and resources necessary to raise a human to adulthood, the incalculable variables that could render their organs unusable, and the difficulty of ensuring that said clone remains in the dark on the until the original ''needs'' a new part. That's all bad for drama, though, so it's usually ignored.
Related to, but not to be confused with, [[Organ Theft]]. In reality, the idea of a child being a "walking transplant" is often used to argue against the possibility of "[[Designer Babies]]" - although there have already been babies screened and selected before birth ''specifically'' to donate to an older sibling (usually in the form of some "replaceable" material, like bone marrow and blood). Sometimes combined with [[Truly Single Parent]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Pet Shop of Horrors]]'': A rather dark story (even for this series
** {{spoiler|D's disease seems to relate to a later-implied need to drink blood. At the end of the story, he's shown drinking a glass of what Chris assumes to be "cranberry juice", in his "sister's" name.}}
* Adorea of ''[[Franken Fran]]''. Under all those bandages is a body covered in zippers for easy access to any emergency spare body parts that Fran might need. Fran replenishes her supply by {{spoiler|letting Adorea swallow people who are nearly dead}}.
* Somewhat [[Tear Jerker]] example: in ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'', Rei invokes this trope on '''herself''' {{spoiler|for [[Cloning Blues|obvious]] [[Back
* A major plot element in ''[[Vandread]]'': {{spoiler|Entire worlds were set up for their peoples to unknowingly provide specific replacement organs for the humans of future-Earth - the homeworlds of the ''Vandread's'' crew, for example, were male-only and female-only and provided their respective reproductive organs.}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* In the very good but largely forgotten DC Comics early 1990s version of ''[[Flash Gordon (
== [[Film]] ==
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== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Jodi Picoult]] examined this in ''[[My
* In the novel and 2010 movie ''[[Never Let Me Go]]'' by Kazuo Ishiguro, the students of Hailsham are all {{spoiler|clones designed to be this, and when they graduate from school they are expected to become donors until they die, a fate which they passively accept as what they are supposed to do}}. They develop their own [[Gallows Humor]] to deal with the horror of their situation, but overall it's a more melancholic/tragic, rather than horrific, take on the subject.
* In the ''[[Vorkosigan Saga]]'', on [[Wretched Hive|Jackson's Whole]], there's a trade in creating beautiful, aged-up clones of the powerful and rich and then scooping out and replacing their brains with those of their progenitors. {{spoiler|The main character's brother,}} Mark, who is a clone for other purposes, was raised amongst these clones and has set out to destroy the industry. At first he tries to do so physically, but when that doesn't work set about to do it economically, by obsoleting the procedure or otherwise making it unfeasible.
** Let's stress this point. Old, rich degenerates have clones made of themselves and make the clones undergo different body-morphing procedures until the time comes when their brains are scrapped and the old geezer's brain is transplanted in. All the while, the kids they are in an exclusive boarding school and all of them are told that they are heirs of VIPs. Then, when they reach physical maturity at the age of 10, they are called to "meet their parents", and they are never seen again...
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** That is ''psychotic''!
*** That is the point.
* The kids' book ''[[Clone Catcher]]'', by Alfred Slote, centers around the use of clones for this purpose; the rich have clones created and then raised in secure compounds until their organs are needed.
* ''[[
* This is the basis of ''Spares'' by Michael Marshall Smith.
* In [[The Patternist Series]] by Octavia E. Butler, the immortal soul eating [[Body Surf
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* There is an episode of ''[[CSI]]'' where a girl is found dead in the desert; turns out she was conceived as a bone marrow donor for her older brother. Older brother felt bad about this and so, in a total failure of logic, killed her.
** He was a staunch Catholic and she was so depressed by her life she was considering suicide. His first plan was to make the parents agree to stop using her as his donor and let him die. They went back on their promise when he had kidney failure, stating that they had only agreed to stop treating the original cancer, not the side effects and were going to force her to donate a kidney. He killed her, confessed to a priest, then planned to die from his disease, thus ensuring both went to heaven, instead of her going to hell as a suicide.
** The question of why he didn't just ''run away'', if he was sufficiently at liberty to dump a body in the desert, is where this troper's [[Insane Troll Logic]]-tolerance ran out.
*** This troper had the same reaction initially, but it made marginally more sense after realizing that given their treatment of the "donor sibling" up to that point, the parents would probably treat her ''even worse'' should her brother, her "reason for living" in the first place, run away for her sake.
* ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise]]'' cloned Trip so Dr. Phlox could get certain brain parts for replacement. The problem was that the clone retained Trip's memories and didn't want to die...
* An episode of ''[[Private Practice]]'' has a mother, six months pregnant with the walking transplant, have her [[Littlest Cancer Patient|terminally ill son]] need a blood transfusion within the week or the son will die. Their baby girl has not developed enough, so what does the mother do? {{spoiler|She jabs a knitting needle up her birth canal to make her waters break. And then the baby dies.}}
** That show loves this trope. One episode featured a couple with a walking transplant baby who was intended to save his twin sisters with leukemia. When he turned out to have only enough cord blood for one sister, the parents were asked to ''choose their favourite'' to treat!
* Used in an episode of ''[[Sliders]]'', which has our Quinn as this for the world-of-the-week's Quinn.
** Another episode features a world where all people or a certain age are considered potential organ donors, whether they want to or not. Each receives a non-removable tracking bracelet that activates when a compatible organ is needed. Then a special police unit arrives to take the "donor" into custody. The doctors behind the program are shown to be corrupt, often using the system to get what they want (i.e. if you don't do what I say, I'll activate your bracelet and take your heart or liver).
* In ''[[Law and Order: Criminal Intent]]'', there was this one guy who goes around literally giving away pieces of himself since he had given away pretty much everything else. {{spoiler|More specifically he was donating his parts to people he felt would change the world for the better...but only if they did. He killed the [[Victim of the Week]] (or rather shot her in a way that would cause brain death so she's become a viable organ doner) because she gave up on her work to become a housewife.}}
** Done in the original ''[[Law and Order]]'' when a doctor is revealed to have been implanting IVF patients with his own sperm, which screws up one couple's plan to save one child by conceiving another. McCoy briefly considers indicting the doctor for the child's death.
* One of the reasons the [[Stargate SG
* [[Heroes|Mohinder]] was conceived to be a blood donor for his sister. Although by the time he was born she was too far gone and was always a point of contention between him and his father.
* On ''[[Neighbours]]'' Nicola was conceived for the purpose of saving her sister Miranda's life. This is a major factor in her psychotic break shortly before she left the show.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* Producing these is revealed to have been the original purpose of the laboratory where ''[[
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[The Venture Brothers]]'': Dr. Venture has this as a partial purpose for his sons. Season 2's premiere [[Cloning Blues|reveals why this]] [[It Makes Sense in Context|is okay]].
* Played for laughs in ''[[Futurama]]''; the Professor keeps Amy around because she is of the same blood type.
** He views all his employees this way: "Damnit, Hermes, just jump already. Stop hogging that healthy liver!"
== [[Real Life]] ==
* Well on its way to aversion in [[Real Life]]. With the rapid advancements being made in [
** I wouldn't be so sure. While it is true that scientists all over the world are researching ways to create artificial tissues to replace damaged ones (especially heart and nerve tissue which lacks any significant regenerative abilities) However, most, if not all of these procedures require human stem cells - and the easiest way to get them is to harvest them from human embryos. To avoid the immune system attacking the transplanted tissue, some scientist have actually mentioned the
*** You can harvest stem cells from the umbilical cord of newly born babies. This avoids all the previous problems.
** (
** I suppose that one could also do this in the future for other reasons - i.e. seeing the effects of drugs on whole humans (rather than just cell cultures or animals).
*** Unlikely; the ethical violations in raising a human being solely to test drugs on are ''incredible''. All said this trope is well and truly averted in real life and will be for the
* Advances in genetic engineering may eventually make it possible to breed domestic pigs with human-analog histocompatibility traits. Most internal organs are similar in pigs and in humans, so such animals would be ideal four-legged examples of this trope, with few ethical constraints and much faster turnaround-time to grow them to adult size.
** To be clear, there is no record of a successful xenotransplantation. Organs grown in the pigs would need to be nearly identical to the
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Walking Transplant]]
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