I know that a large part of organ transplants are if they’ll stick or get rejected, but why do they do that? I imagine if your body wants to live it’ll take what it can get so to outright refuse a new organ seems a little counterproductive unless there’s something inhibiting that.
In: Biology
>unless there’s something inhibiting that
Yes, a functioning immune system.
Every moment of your life from birth to death, your immune system is killing things that want to live in and parasitise off of you. The key thing it needs to get right is to determine what is not (or no longer) you. And a transplant organ is **not you**.
There’s no higher thought involved about the body wanting to live or needing to know better than to attack a life-saving transplant. If those cells of the immune system detect cells without the right “I’m part of this body” secret handshake (HLA, human leukocyte antigen), they just kill them.
The way you get around this is by getting an organ whose secret handshake is as close a match as possible, and giving drugs that interfere with the immune system of the recipient. And it’ll still catch on eventually.
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