From the Variety review:
Kelsey Grammer and Julia Stiles do not make a natural romantic couple, and their awkward pairing is the largest misstep made by “The God Committee,” writer-director Austin Stark’s adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s play about a group of doctors tasked with deciding which of three patients should receive a heart transplant.
With the intended recipient of a fresh heart perishing on the operating table, a new beneficiary must be selected in one hour, lest the in-demand organ expire. That sets the ticking-time-bomb tone for the ensuing action,
Their task is to choose from a trio of candidates: an overweight, bipolar father-of-three; a smart single woman with no family and mixed feelings about a transplant; and Trip Granger (Maurizio Di Meo), the hard-partying son of wealthy financier Emmett Granger (Dan Hedaya), who complicates matters both by offering to donate $25 million to the hospital so his son gets the organ, and by directly pressuring Dr. Boxer, whose forthcoming private research endeavor he’s committed to bankrolling.
The emotional, financial, religious, and ethical factors that go into this medical question all quickly become a part of the screenplays’s thorny debates.
You get the picture. (It is streaming on Apple TV+.)
This brings me to the upcoming National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) event (July 15th, 11 am Eastern):
Yes, it is a mouthful. I am in the session:
Creating a Fairer and More Equitable System: Are There Structural Barriers Embedded in the Path to an Organ Transplant in the U.S.?
I plan to highlight two issues in allocation, one dealing with gender (and size) disparity – Exception Points and Split Liver Transplants are remedies as I had recently posted in To Split, or not to Split? — and the other with geographic disparity (OrganJet), in access to transplantation.
Scroll right on top of the post to see all the topics I have been working in with academic colleagues as well as with surgeons (at MGH and UCSF), and OPOs (NJ, Nevada, Georgia).
There is a later session:
Aligning Incentives: What Can Be Done to Increase the Efficiency and Effectiveness of the Organ Transplant System?
In this session, I would have remarked on the unintended effect of Conditions of Participation (COP) on Organ Discards, as Transplant Centers behave strategically to manage risk as measured by the thresholds set in the COP.
The final session is on:
Increasing Rates of Organ Donation and Acceptance: What Steps Would Save More Lives of Those On the Waitlist?
Here my work on increasing second person consent (SPC) from legal next-of-kin (NOK) via Nudge videos would have been my chosen topic.
The stated objective of this event is:
Give members of the public and stakeholders in the transplant community an opportunity to share their comments and ideas with the committee for creating a fairer, more equitable, cost-effective, and transparent system of donor organ procurement, allocation, and distribution.
Responding promptly to my seeking guidance on how best to prepare and present, Al Roth and John Roberts suggested:
Time goes by quickly. Good notes will be useful.
How about discussing the thinking behind OrganJet and how it overcomes some of the access barriers.
Guess what I am working on this afternoon!
Update: It was a very informative event. I have uploaded my prepared remarks.
