Why didn't they take more organs from them.

Very good question. I think that when Ruth is abandoned by staff at the end of her surgery, this is done for dramatic effect. It shows that her life is valueless to the "real humans".

In our world it would make sense for the surgeons to harvest the rest of her organs and put them on ice: but perhaps in this alternate reality that is unnecessary because donors are never in short supply, and organs are only taken when specifically needed?

There are a few technical reasons why they might only take a few organs:

1. Supply & Demand - in the case of corneas, they are one of the few tissues which can be stored so don't need to be used straight away. Corneas also don't need to be tissue typed unless the patient's corneas have become vascularised (blood vessels growing across the surface of the cornea). For that reason they would probably have a large store of corneas and wouldn't need to take corneas from every single donor - this happens in the real world. Considering they have lots of donors being raised, then maybe supply outstrips demand for many other organs too - this is suggested since donors live a while until they're needed.

2. Tissue typing - most organs need to be tissue typed to make sure the donor is a match for the patient (the few exceptions are some corneas and livers). Many organs also don't last very long (hearts and lungs must be transplanted within 6 hours - which isn't very long in terms of surgery), so if they urgently needed one organ for a patient, but had no use for the other organs, then there's no need to take out every organ. This is implied a few times, when Kathy says most donors survive 3 or 4 donations but some don't even survive 1 - it probably depends entirely on what they need.


...but most of it is probably for poetic license - after all, technicalities like tissue typing could have easily been put into the storyline but weren't. Tissue typing would have also made much more sense than having clones - but since the story is entirely from the view of the donors then I like to think that part of the story was just false rumours (I work in transplantation so maybe I'm biased! :p ).

I was thinking about that too.

It's "rumored" that they do.

Take another look at the scene where Ruth and Kathy are reunited, and Ruth is saying there's a rumor that after four donations they drop the "carers" and make the donors linger indefinitely on life support and sedation in crummy rooms donating until they die. "I don't think I'd particularly fancy that," she says.

That's probably what they do.


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Please put some dashes above your sig line so I won't think it's part of your dumb post.

In the book they actually take out every single organ of the donators.

I've seen the film long ago, so I couldn't tell what they actually show. But in the book there's this story circulating among the donors about what happens once they "terminate": they keep them alive somehow to go on taking the rest of the organs from them. Their urban myth claims they are still conscious while they do that. So, why not taking them altogether right away when they reach a certain age? There's a hint of an answer in the book: these are the first decades since donations started, and society is still uncomfortable with the idea of these clones; so I guess they still provide them a kind of hope -and, most important, the uncertainty of the moment of death: donors can live a little longer as long as they survive their donations. At the end of the book, we get to know that things are changing now, towards much less "humanitarian" policies.

I think it's quite likely that they actually take more organs when the donor "completes" (dies), but we just don't see it in the movie.