IT IS NATIONAL Transplant Week. Do not be alarmed. The campaign is aimed only at getting you to sign on to the NHS organ donor register. Not until death will anyone slice out a kidney or a cornea. And there is no harm in that. When you are dead, there is no harm in anything — at least, not to you.

When post-mortem organ donation costs nothing, why is only a fifth of the population registered? Why does Britain suffer a chronic shortage of donors, which results in hundreds of people dying each year while waiting for organ transplants? The answer is that it is too expensive to become an organ donor. I just registered on line. The process took about 15 minutes. And that is far too much trouble to be worth it. For someone who earns £25,000 a year, 15 minutes’ toil is worth £3.

That is not much to save a life, you protest. But by becoming an organ donor, you do not save a life. Dying in circumstances that make organ donation possible is very unlikely. Last year there were 13 million registered donors and only 760 donations from dead people. A registered donor has only a one in 15,000 chance of saving a life. If you are not willing to spend £45,000 to be sure of saving the life of a stranger — which I, for one, am not — why should you spend £3 to get a one in 15,000 chance of saving a stranger? Significantly, to increase the number of organ donations, becoming a donor must cost nothing. This could be achieved at the stroke of a parliamentary pen. Everyone should be assumed willing to donate his organs at death. Those who do not wish to donate should be required to register their objection. People should have to opt out rather than opt in to organ donation. This would at least triple the number of organ donors overnight and save hundreds of lives a year.

What stops our representatives from making this simple change in the law? I suspect they are pandering to superstition. Despite the great expansion of human knowledge in recent centuries, there are still people who believe that all human tissue is sacred, including corpses and small insensate collections of living cells (embryos).

Usually, such foolishness is only a personal problem. But when it perverts legislation and results in hundreds of need- less deaths every year, it is a tragedy and a disgrace.