[4] Narratives about organ transplants in science fiction are so widely known in public consciousness that they are occasionally referenced alongside actual medical technology developments.
Explaining the advancements of his company, Revivicor, into xenotransplantation technology, David Ayares told NPR that, "[I]t's no longer a science fiction experiment.
[8] The term "organlegging" was coined by Larry Niven in a series of short stories set in his Known Space future universe originally published in a 1976 collection called The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, later expanded and re-released as Flatlander.
The basic structure, whether reported orally or by media, is that a businessperson is traveling abroad, and is then abducted or seduced, and wakes up later with their kidneys having been removed, maybe noticing a dramatic scar on their lower back.
This story works as a cautionary tale to be aware of strangers, or as a tragedy of exploitation if the victims were children or had minimal agency, and fueled xenophobia.
Unlike in Niven's novels, donors are kept alive for as long as possible to enable more organs to be removed for transplant until they eventually succumb from their injuries.
Unbeknown to the surgeons however, the unwilling donor was a ghoul, a monster who eats human flesh, causing the main character to have ghoul-like characteristics.
The 2005 American science fiction action thriller film The Island continues the theme, where clones live in a highly structured environment isolated in a compound.
The hero escapes after learning that the inhabitants are clones used for organ harvesting and surrogate motherhood for wealthy people in the outside world.
Author Jay Clayton noted that the in-universe portrayal of the public reaction to the discovery of a school where clones are raised to be organ donors draws comparisons to retrospective reactions to real-world situations such as enslavement in the United States, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and medical experimentation by Nazis.
[12] Another author reviewing Never Let Me Go argued that it follows a similar structure to boarding school novels, where a youth grows up to fully realize their purpose, traditionally being a vocation and here being to become an organ donor.
The plot of Unwind, a 2007 science fiction novel by young adult literature author Neal Shusterman, takes place in the United States, after a civil war somewhere in the near future.
In the film John Q., the character played by Denzel Washington takes a hospital hostage in hopes to force the surgical staff to transplant his heart into his dying son.
In the TV series Psycho-Pass, the antagonist is given the opportunity to donate his brain to help power a system that determines if an someone is likely to perform a crime.
[17] Organ transplantation has also been used as a major plot element in a number of comedies, including Przekładaniec (1968, Poland), The Thing with Two Heads (1972) and The Man With Two Brains (1983).