Speech at Gaziantep University in Turkey
This photo was taken at a presentation I made at Gaziantep university hospital, Turkey, to the medical staff and students at a local health care college. Looking at it, can anyone doubt the power of these presentations to change minds even in a country where cadaveric donations are minimal? The editor of the hospital’s webtv, a devout Muslim, wrote this: “This is my best day of my entire life. Today I put my name in the registry to donate all my organs. Now I can step in front of God freely and I will not blush for what I have done.”
March 2016
This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’