I am pleased that the book’s reception vindicated my belief that stories of social significance involving medicine and medical research could be as entertaining and engaging as those dealing with detectives, spies, political intrigue, and traditional whodunits. On a lighter note, Coma essentially created a popular new genre: the medical/biotech mystery thriller. It is indeed a sorry situation because appropriate organs are regularly given over to the microbes and worms for a lack of appropriate public policy. In fact, Coma could be published today since its story line and message are even more currently cogent, with more people waiting for lifesaving organs than in 1977 and more people dying for a lack thereof. Although I succeeded in scaring people away from operating room 8, which certainly wasn’t my goal, the larger issue was not solved. Unfortunately things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped. Since I had done some transplant surgery myself, I was particularly concerned about this situation, and it became my dream that an entertaining novel and a subsequent movie could influence public policy to nip the developing problem in the bud. The medical community had been racing ahead, improving the efficacy of transplantation and providing hope for certain desperately ill people, but at the same time giving little thought to the supply side of the equation.

My motivation for writing Coma was to dramatize the looming shortage of organs for transplantation. Here it is twenty-five years after the publication of Coma, and I find it a shocking milestone for me as an individual (Where have twenty-five years gone?) and, in a particular sense, a rather sorry milestone for society and medicine.

Coma by Robin Cook