Everyone’s seen the clichéd TV trope – White coat medical professionals rush down hospital halls cautiously clutching a plastic picnic cooler kitted out with hazard tape and covered with stickers reading ‘caution: human organ for transplant’.
It’s easy to believe that this an over-dramatised representation of the real-life transportation process for organs heading for transplant, but perhaps surprisingly, the majority of human organs around the world are still transferred between donor and recipient using a large cooler box filled with ice, with little advancement since the first successful heart transplant in the 1960s.