Walking Transplant

Organ donation is a noble thing. Lots of us have little cards that tell the doctors that if we have life rudely yoinked out from under our feet, they can take what's left of us to make sure that the same tragedy doesn't befall someone else. Some forms of donation — like donating a kidney, or half a liver (which can conveniently regenerate itself) — can actually be done while still alive, which is just as brave, especially since you'll be pottering around the planet for years to come and are still willing to hand over an internal organ so that someone else can live.

Most of us agree, though, that it is not something we would want to have forced on us, thank you very much. At that point, the kind act of donation becomes little more than mutilation. Cue fiction.

This character (usually a clone) exists for one reason — as "spare parts" for another character. It usually turns up in sci-fi/horror settings, but occasionally makes a guest appearance in emotional drama. They can be raised to cherish their purpose and perfectly content with their (usually fairly short) existence, or they can rage and fight against it. The qualifier is, the only reason they were born is because someone else might need their various body parts at some point. Rather depressing.

This is a pretty legitimate source of angst for the character who's treated like a spare tire (and usually with about as much consideration for their feelings). This is their body — the one they were born with, with all their own genetics and personality traits — but as far as the people around them are concerned, the Walking Transplant's very flesh and blood are the exclusive property of whoever they were created to be the donor for.

Fridge Logic begins to creep in once you remember the time and resources necessary to raise a human to adulthood, the incalculable variables that could render their organs unusable, and the difficulty of ensuring that said clone remains in the dark until the original needs a new part is the equivalent of building a brand new car solely for it to be cannibalized for spare parts (usually only one spare part, at that). Also, even if this is for some reason unavoidable, it's pretty much unclear why clone's brain couldn't be prevented from being developed in early embryo stage by micro-surgical operation — essentially avoiding all those pesky moral problems, and just growing a healthy body without any neural reactions more complex than basic breathing and heartbeat. That's all bad for drama, though, so it's usually ignored.

Related to, but not to be confused with, Organ Theft. In reality, the idea of a child being a "walking transplant" is often used to argue against the possibility of "Designer Babies" — although there have already been babies screened and selected before birth specifically to donate to an older sibling (usually in the form of some "replaceable" material, like bone marrow and blood). Sometimes combined with Truly Single Parent. Cloning Body Parts is an attempt to make compatible transplants without the ethical issues involved here. Raised as a Host is when a person is raised with the intention of their entire body being taken over by another.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Astra Lost in Space uses this as the twist for all of the main characters—all of them were supposed to be a spare body for their genetic parents, so that they can relive their youth with all their current knowledge. Since cloning is illegal, however, the parents decided to bury the evidence of their cloning by sending all the kids out into space to die. Quitterie's younger sister, Funicia, is a more straightforward example as she's too young to do any body hopping, so she's intended to be used for spare organs.
• Adorea of Franken Fran. Under all those bandages is a body covered in zippers for easy access to any emergency spare body parts that Fran might need. Fran replenishes her supply by letting Adorea swallow people who are nearly dead.
• Noble Demon Nouza from Gaiking: Legend of Daiku Maryu is revealed to be not only this, but an Expendable Clone as well — just one of many spare bodies to provide Proist with parts.
• One episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex features a ranch full of genetically modified pigs with organs tailored for human transplant. Each one is designed for a specific customer, but if the customer doesn't need anything within the pig's lifetime, the organs can still be distributed to compatible recipients.
• Somewhat Tear Jerker example: in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rei invokes this trope on herself for obvious reasons. Ritsuko even refers to Rei's clones as spare parts. The unsettling part? Rei-03 remembers the deaths of her predecessors and wants to die herself, permanently. By finale, it seems she finally got her wish.
• Pet Shop of Horrors: A rather dark story (even for this series...) reveals that Count D's father engineered a "sister" for D (she's actually an orangutan) to provide him with "spare parts," since D apparently suffers from some kind of Soap Opera Disease that is introduced and then forgotten about. She is eerily proud of her purpose. D's disease seems to relate to a later-implied need to drink blood. At the end of the story, he's shown drinking a glass of what Chris assumes to be "cranberry juice", in his "sister's" name.
• A major plot element in Vandread is that the Harvesters are raiding human colonies for specific organs and tissues and some colonies willingly collaborate to avoid complete destruction. The residents of Earth became obsessed with lengthening their lifespans and began to regard the colonists as nothing but organ banks for their survival. For bonus points, they specialized each colony to harvest a single part. The protagonists come from the male and female reproductive organ farms, which also explains the Sexism War between them.

Comic Books

• In the Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn run of Deadpool, it is revealed that Deadpool had been involuntarily harvested for organs for years. His captors kept erasing his memory of the incidents which didn't help his already shaky sense of memory and time.
• In Flash Gordon (1988), the Yellow race of Mongo are acculturated to view their fate as organ replacements for the ruling Grays as the equivalent of going to Heaven.
• In Flashpoint (1999), Vandal Savage creates brain-dead clones of himself to harvest their organs and keep himself youthful in his immortality.
• This was part of the Superman mythos during the Post-Crisis era. Krypton had begun cloning themselves with the idea of prolonging their lives. However, a group of terrorists known as Black Zero initiated a war against this sort of thing, ultimately leading to Krypton's destruction years down the line.
• Terror Inc.: Terror is able to replace body parts by tearing them off of other people, also allowing him to copy their abilities — something like a Body Horror version of Rogue.

Fan Fiction

• A complicated variation of this features in the Star Trek: Voyager fic "Stalemate", in which Ambassador Chakotay from the future depicted in the novels arrives on Voyager during the events of "Endgame". Prior to him travelling to the past, he engaged in an intense mind-meld with Tuvok's son which essentially grafted a copy of the son's mental engrams into Chakotay's brain, which would serve as a 'substitute' for the family mind-meld Tuvok would need to cure his degenerative mental condition. The presence of Vulcan neural engrams caused the future Chakotay serious brain damage from the strain, but he accepted this plan in the name of preventing Kathryn Janeway's assimilation in the original timeline.
• In Urusei Yatsura: The Senior Year by Gorgo, one of the ancient Precursor races had the common policy of using cloning technology to create multiple duplicates of themselves, who would be stored until their original template required replacement organs or such (an entire section of one chapter is devoted to a horrified Ataru witnessing the apparent clone of one of the girls he had befriended being cut opened and having her organs extracted inside a memory construct/flashback). These clones were treated as little more than spare parts. Because of this, some of the peoples who descended from these Abusive Precursors were very against the technology of cloning, although they still treat some of the people who descended from said clones a little derisively.

Films — Live-Action

• The whole premise of The Island (2005) and Clonus (the similarity between the two sparking a lawsuit). Just to ram home how inhumane the treatment of the clones is, in The Island we see a baby being removed from its clone mother to be given to the "original" (who couldn't conceive) — after which the clone is "disposed of". For further effect, a clone who wakes up on the operating tables as his organs are removed is harpooned and dragged back so they can finish the job. The "sponsor" (original version) of the main character refers to his clone as "his insurance policy," underlining the fact that the clones are seen as sub-human, and the property of whoever pays for them.
  • However, the "sponsors" don't know what the cloning process is like; the guy in charge (and main baddie) has told everyone that the clones have no mental processes to speak of, and essentially only exist as bags of organs. And he'd much rather the real story never came out...
  • In Clonus, the originals know damn well what the process is like and just don't care. The clones are treated somewhat nicer than in The Island, though, up until they're stripped for parts.
• Used for Black Comedy in one scene of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. A pair of guys go to an organ donor's door and cut him open to get his liver.

Literature

• In "The Beast of 309" by T. J. Bass, a man who lost his eye as a child works for a long time to afford a cloned replacement. The medics say it will take over four years to grow. At the end, he has a cardiac arrest, and the medics say there is also a heart transplant available somehow in case it is needed. Then he connects the dots with the fact his own eye has been lost when he was four... thankfully, the new heart wasn't needed in the end.
• Classic Singapore Horror Stories has a story set in the future, "Down on the Farm", in which clones are genetically created for providing body parts for rich clients. The farm's owner, an unnamed man referred to as the Administrator, specially takes delight in selecting clones to be sold off for parts, calling them "good business" with a section mentioning one of the clone girls who used to be the most beautiful one around the farm "having no legs or arms, and making horrible noises at the red hole her face used to be".
• The kids' book Clone Catcher by Alfred Slote centers around the use of clones for this purpose; the rich have clones created and then raised in secure compounds until their organs are needed.
• Colum from Gideon the Ninth is a fantasy version: he and his brothers were born purely so that Silas would have someone to siphon the soul from to power his necromancy, and he's been given antigens and antibodies since before Silas was born to make it easier for Silas to do so. He even mentions that the fact that he has brothers is purely because his parents wanted different blood type options depending on what would be easiest for Silas to use.
• The protagonist of The Godwhale of T. J. Bass loses his legs and gets frozen until his condition can be fixed. A few centuries later, he is defrosted in order to become a settler on another planet. The new legs are ready... but when the guy learns they are attached to a boy who will have to die for him to get them, he asks to send the boy as the settler, and himself back into the freezer.
• House of the Scorpion features entire People Farms for this purpose. Those used are all clones, which "aren't human" anyways. As a rule, they're deliberately brain-damaged shortly after birth so as to make sure they don't seem human. The main character is a rare exception, though still a potential involuntary organ donor, because his "father" is just that sort of guy.
• Known Space:
  • Jan Corben did this with series of clone daughters, via brain transplant. Each time she would assume the clone's identity, "inherit" all her stuff, and the identity attached to the old body would "die in a tragic accident". She survived for a timespan of 20, maybe 30 generations that way before suffering a genuine tragic accident.
  • The Jigsaw Man is about a man about to be executed for a crime he believes doesn't warrant the death penalty (he was convicted for traffic violations), so he attempts to escape a fate of being harvested for all of his organs and body parts in a time when every crime carries the death penalty, simply because of how many lives criminals save when they're executed.
• My Sister's Keeper: Anna is a designer baby, genetically engineered to save the life of her older sister, Kate. When Kate's kidneys fail, Anna's parents expect her to hand over one of her kidneys. She sues them in order to gain control of her own body although it is later revealed that big sister — and the beneficiary of Anna's donations — Kate had much more trouble with this arrangement than Anna did. The attitude of her mother, in particular, can be pretty chilling — at the best of times, Sara is hugely insensitive and so obsessed with Kate that she fails to see the dire straits Anna and older brother Jesse are in... but at worst, there is something downright creepy in her tendency to break Anna down into her component physical parts. Two examples stand out: Even at Anna's birth, Sara totally fails to mention her newborn as she rushes off to oversee Kate's treatment thanks to Anna's umbilical cord. Still creepier is when she denies Anna a chance to go to hockey camp in case something happens to Kate — since when the next crisis strikes "we will need Anna — her blood, her stem cells, her tissue — right here".
• In Never Let Me Go, the students of Hailsham are all clones designed to be this, and when they graduate from school, they are expected to become donors until they die, a fate which they passively accept as what they are supposed to do. They develop their own Gallows Humor to deal with the horror of their situation, but overall, it's a more melancholic/tragic, rather than horrific, take on the subject.
• In Oryx and Crake, pigoons are chimeric pigs engineered to have multiple redundant human-compatible organs for transplants. In MaddAddam, it turns out that the human brain cells for Alzheimer's patients makes them sapient, and the Crakers and Gardeners make an alliance with them following a few "misunderstandings".
• In Patternist, the immortal soul eating Body Surfer Doro attempted to create a new race of human telepaths through a selective breeding program extending from the early ages of human history towards the present so he can have new bodies to possess. He is eventually Hoist by His Own Petard as one of his group of eponymous network telepaths struggle beyond his control and absorb him instead.
• The "hyperpigs" of the Revelation Space Series were originally genetically engineered pigs destined for organ transplant, though at some point scientists began to augment their intelligence; likely once their original purpose became irrelevant following advances in technology). They are generally mute and, though more intelligent than normal pigs, aren't as intelligent as humans — even Scorpio, an intelligent pig, notes that he doesn't understand complex human interaction or music — though a hyperpig (who's a cop) data analyst appears in The Prefect.
• This is the basis of Spares by Michael Marshall Smith; in the future, the elites have clones made that are regularly harvested for body parts and organs when the hedonism of the elites catch up with them.
• In Unwind, there was a war between the pro-choice and pro-life people in America. A compromise was reached when the government decided that anybody from birth to 13 could not be killed, but from 13 to 18, they could be retroactively aborted, or "unwound". All their body parts (not just organs) were taken away from them and given to other people. The main characters of the book are "Unwinds" who volunteered for this process for different reasons. Connor is a troublemaker. Risa, who is a ward of the state, has reached the peak of her musical ability so she is going to be unwound to save costs. Lev is volunteered because his parents are strict Christians who give 10% of everything to God, including children, and Lev is the tenth child.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, on Jackson's Whole, there's a trade in creating beautiful, aged-up clones of the powerful and rich and then scooping out and replacing their brains with those of their progenitors. The main character's brother Mark, who is a clone for other purposes, was raised amongst these clones and has set out to destroy the industry. At first, he tries to do so physically, but when that doesn't work set about to do it economically, by obsoleting the procedure or otherwise making it unfeasible. Let's stress this point — old, rich degenerates have clones made of themselves and make the clones undergo different body-morphing procedures until the time comes when their brains are scrapped and the old geezer's brain is transplanted in. All the while, the kids think they are in an exclusive boarding school and all of them are told that they are heirs of VIPs. Then, when they reach physical maturity at the age of 10, they are called to "meet their parents", and they are never seen again...

Live-Action TV

• Continuum combines this with Time Travel. In one apocalyptic future, Kellog is a warlord dying of kidney cancer. He sends his daughter back in time to find and guard his past self so that he can travel back himself and take his own past kidneys. Past Kellog objects, kills his future-self's daughter, and steals the trigger for the time machine to try to send himself further back and avoid any of this happening. Too bad Alec reprogrammed the trigger.
• In one episode of CSI, a girl is found dead in the desert; it turns out that she was conceived as a bone marrow donor for her older brother, who felt bad about this due to his staunch Catholic beliefs, and she was so depressed by her life she was considering suicide. His first plan was to make the parents agree to stop using her as his donor and let him die. They went back on their promise when he had kidney failure, stating that they had only agreed to stop treating the original cancer, not the side effects and were going to force her to donate a kidney. He killed her, confessed to a priest, then planned to die from his disease, thus ensuring both went to heaven, instead of her going to hell as a suicide.
• The Firefly episode "The Message" features a variation in which a character is used to smuggle cloned organs. (They're smuggled because the technology is still experimental and has yet to go through Space FDA approval.) A surgeon scooped out his original wetware and put it on ice, the plan being to put it back at his destination.
• Heroes: Mohinder was conceived to be a blood donor for his sister, although by the time he was born, she was too far gone. This was always a point of contention between him and his father.
• Law & Order:
  • Done in the original Law & Order episode "Seed" when a doctor is revealed to have been implanting IVF patients with his own sperm, which screws up one couple's plan to save one child by conceiving another. McCoy briefly considers indicting the doctor for the child's death.
  • In the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Ex Stasis", there was this one guy who goes around literally giving away pieces of himself since he had given away pretty much everything else. More specifically, he was donating his parts to people he felt would change the world for the better... but only if they did. He killed the Victim of the Week (or rather shot her in a way that would cause brain death so she'd become a viable organ donor) because she gave up on her work to become a housewife.
• In Neighbours, Nicola was conceived for the purpose of saving her sister Miranda's life. This is a major factor in her psychotic break shortly before she left the show.
• A major plot in Orphan Black is whether or not to let Sarah's daughter Kira donate stem cells to Cosima, who is suffering from the mysterious illness that many of the clones have. Kira is the best match, since Sarah and Cosima are clones.
• Private Practice:
  • One episode has a mother, six months pregnant with the walking transplant, have her terminally ill son need a blood transfusion within the week or the son will die. Their baby girl has not developed enough, so what does the mother do? She jabs a knitting needle up her birth canal to make her waters break. Then the baby dies.
  • Another episode features a couple with a walking transplant baby who was intended to save his twin sisters with leukemia. When he turns out to have only enough cord blood for one sister, the parents are asked to choose their favourite to treat!
• ReGenesis: Mick was genetically engineered by his father to lack a gene that causes bone cancer, so that he could provide his fatally ill brother with the needed bone marrow grafts, since his father couldn't find any compatible donors. Though the process isn't fatal for him, he's still pretty depressed about his condition, for a variety of reasons.
• Sliders:
  • Used in one episode, which has our Quinn mistaken for a clone of the world-of-the-week's Quinn — who needs new eyes after being blinded in an accident. The clones are fully alive and... it basically predicted The Island (2005), including ending with the practice being exposed and stopped entirely. We end with three Quinns in one scene for the first time: ours, the real clone, and this world's Quinn, who will remain blind for life but is perfectly okay with it if the alternative is murdering/maiming another human being.
  • Another episode features a world where all people or a certain age are considered potential organ donors, whether they want to or not. Each receives a non-removable tracking bracelet that activates when a compatible organ is needed. Then a special police unit arrives to take the "donor" into custody. The doctors behind the program are shown to be corrupt, often using the system to get what they want (i.e., "If you don't do what I say, I'll activate your bracelet and take your heart or liver").
• Smallville: This is the entire point of the clones of Lex Luthor. They were made so that their body parts and organs could be used to "rebuild" Lex's body after he was severely wounded in an explosion. When Lex "Prime" was killed permanently in season eight, the clones were still used for this, but this time to create a stable clone of Lex that could take his place (and have all of his memories). And if it wasn't all disturbing enough, the project ran out of clones before they could take a heart, because the last clone had already been hidden from Lex's people, so the Earth-2 version of Lionel Luthor, looking to get his son back, took this trope even further — by trying to take the heart from his own daughter.
• Stargate SG-1: One of the reasons why the Goa'uld System Lords take their lo'tars (trusted human servants; literally means "you, human") everywhere with them is to have a spare host in case their current one expires for any reason. In this case, the lo'tars are donating their entire bodies. However, most are indoctrinated from birth into believing it to be an honor. They are also expected to be knowledgeable about Goa'uld politics in order to avoid any faux pas.
• In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Similitude", Trip is cloned so that Dr. Phlox can get certain brain parts for replacement. The problem is that the clone retains Trip's memories and doesn't want to die... Though, to be fair, the clone was created on the assumption (based on Lyssarian studies) that the required transplant won't actually harm the clone, saving Trip without causing any real damage. Unfortunately, it turns out that clones made from human DNA are considerably more fragile, and the removal of the required amount of brain matter will kill the clone "Sim".

Music

• The Capitol Steps parodied this concept in "Everybody Must Get Cloned" (itself a parody of a certain Bob Dylan song). The character makes a somewhat deteriorated clone of himself for "replacement parts," and then it turns out his clone has a sub-clone for the same purpose.

Video Games

• Producing these is revealed to have been the original purpose of the laboratory where 1213 takes place before the world ended.
• Mass Effect:
  • In the first game, Garrus mentions a criminal who once got away from him — a Salarian doctor who was cloning organs inside poor volunteers for a black-market organ ring. Shepard can track him down to find that his patients have gone insane and can bring karma upon him.
  • This is a major plot point of Mass Effect 3: Citadel. During Cerberus' project to revive the dead Shepard in Mass Effect 2, they cloned him/her in order to have a complete set of replacement organs for Shepard in case something went wrong. The clone was kept sedated, but around the same time the Normandy SR-2 hit the Collector base the clone was revived by and escaped with a disgruntled Cerberus employee, and is the expansion's Arc Villain.

Web Originals

• SCP Foundation:
  • In the End of Death canon, Prometheus Labs develops full-body transplants to help the aging population, giving them new bodies to escape their old, decaying ones. Just don't ask where they get the bodies.
  • SCP-415 is known as the Harvested Man, whose body is outfitted with zippers for ease of access to his organs, which regenerate within a few months (including possibly his brain, as the top of his head can be popped off).
• Feral from Strong Female Protagonist has a Healing Factor that allows for the rapid regeneration of her organs. She decides to volunteer as a perpetual organ and tissue donor, even knowing that she cannot be anaesthetized. Later on, Alison coerces Max to permanently augment Feral's power, such that she's able to heal back her organs at such a rate that any longer than forty hours of extraction surgery a month would cause logistical problems.

Western Animation

• Played for laughs in Futurama; the Professor keeps Amy around because she is of the same blood type. He views all his employees this way: "Damnit, Hermes, just jump already. Stop hogging that healthy liver!"
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Horde Prime's army is composed of clones of himself. Apparently, his extra eyes are "trophies" from some of his favorites, but otherwise, he skips the organ harvesting and goes right to Body Surfing. He can transfer his consciousness to any vessel at any time, and when he dies, he simply takes over a spare body, making him functionally immortal. Hordak was also trying to clone himself to compensate for his physical weakness; whether he was also capable of body surfing or was just planning on the traditional method is unclear, but since he wasn't able to create a viable clone, the point is moot.
• In one episode of Ugly Americans, Mark talks about how clones were originally made for this purpose, but now they're used for a variety of other reasons such as marital aids. At the end of that episode, Mark's evil clone is chopped up for spare parts after he's executed for murder. Grimes gets his eyes and legs to replace the ones the clone destroyed.
• The Venture Bros.: Dr. Venture has this as a partial purpose for his sons. Season 2's premiere reveals why this is okay.

Real Life

• This trope is the basis for the saviour sibling, a child who was conceived for no other reason than to provide a transplant for their older brother or sister with a condition (mostly severe and potentially fatal, but treatable ones, such as Fanconi anemia and some forms of cancer) that could be best treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. While this is a fairly reliable means of treatment, there are some ethical concerns to consider here; often, the health of the donor child isn’t considered to be as important as that of the recipient, plus there’s the not-so-small issue of the donor growing up to find out that they were only given life for the purpose of giving a second chance to their sibling, which effectively means that the sum of their existence is nothing more than a commodity.
• Possibly on its way to aversion in Real Life. With the rapid advancements being made in tissue engineering, The Island (2005)-style cloning people for parts makes absolutely no sense. The method of building organs discussed in 2057, by using a "cell-jet" printer, is actually being worked on.
• To avoid the immune system attacking the transplanted tissue, some scientist have actually mentioned the posibility of cloning the patients and harvesting the stem cells from the embryos before they get any chance to get angsty and turn against their creators.
• Along the same vein, some scientists are also trying to use the stem cells that can be found in an adult's body (like, for example, in the bone marrow, or in certain skin layers) for these purpose, allthough this is slightly harder as those cells are multipotent and can only turn into certain types of other cells. Some scientists are trying to reverse them to their pluripotent state, though.
  • The 2012 Nobel prize for Medicine went to a scientist who did reverse adult, multipotent stem cells to pluripotent stem cells that can divide into any cell in the body — but not embryonic tissues, so they can't create a new human being anyway. By the early 2020s, this technique was capable of things like producing cardiac muscle from stem cells extracted from a patient's blood. But that is far from full cultured organs.
• Possible aversion of this trope with experiments with stimulating unfertilized egg cells to divide and create stem cells. Possibly inspired by teratomas, which arise from germ cells and can contain any kind of tissue.
• Advances in genetic engineering may eventually make it possible to breed domestic pigs with human-analog histocompatibility traits. Most internal organs are similar in pigs and in humans, so such animals would be ideal four-legged examples of this trope, with few ethical constraints and much faster turnaround-time to grow them to adult size.
  • So far, there have only been a couple of experimental xenotransplants into humans of hearts and kidneys from pigs genetically engineered to be compatible donors. The recipients were not eligible to receive human organs; either due to risks to them from surgery or due to already being brain-dead. The transplanted organs were not acutely rejected, but the patients did not survive more than a couple of months and remained on life-support for all that time.

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