On 29 September 1994 an American family was driving along the Salerno to Reggio Calabria motorway. Two bandits mistook their car for a jeweller's and opened fire. Nicholas Green, seven years old, was asleep on the back seat.
He was taken to Messina, to the Policlinico Gaetano Martino university hospital. He died two days later, on 1 October. His parents, Reginald and Maggie Green, decided to donate his organs and corneas.
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critically ill Italians received Nicholas' organs and corneas
DONARTE welcome message, 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions
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organ donations in Italy over the following ten years
DONARTE 2023 welcome message
30
donors per million population: the target Sicily has set for itself
"Targeting 30 in Sicily", the DONARTE 2024 leitmotif
That decision, taken on the worst day of their lives and in a country not their own, changed how Italy thinks about donation. It became known as the Nicholas Effect.
Twenty-eight years later
On 27 April 2022, in Noida in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Rolly Prajapati was shot. She was six years old. On 30 April she was declared brain dead and her family consented to the donation of her organs. As in Italy twenty-eight years earlier, donations rose significantly.
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donations after brain death in India between 2013 and 2024
Deepak Gupta, DONARTE interview
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lives a single donor can save
Deepak Gupta, DONARTE interview
Two children, on two continents and twenty-eight years apart, and in both cases a family that chose to donate. The congress carries both their names.
What the association exists to do
The association works to make organ donation and transplantation understood, by citizens and by public and private bodies alike, using every means available, and to build a culture of donation locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
It also supports, in every form, the patients waiting for a transplant and their families, promotes scientific research, works on prevention and screening, and advances the inclusion of people living with illness and disability. The congress, the Premio and the Transplant Games are the forms this work takes.
The association is not for profit, and pursues civic, solidarity-based and socially useful ends.
Science and art
For the association, scientific conferences and seminars count for exactly as much as cultural, artistic, sporting and performance events. They are means to one end. Hence the name, DONARTE, and a congress where the scientific conference and the art exhibition occupy the same room.
Donation itself is an art which requires courage, awareness, and generosity.
Art and science are free, and their teaching is free.
Constitution of the Italian Republic
Source: Article 33, first paragraph
Art is a catalyst for change and awareness.
Nelson Mandela
Source: Quotation supplied by the association
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Source: Attributed to Edgar Degas
In 2024, thirty years after the donation, Reginald and Maggie Green returned to Messina, to the city and the hospital that had received their child. With them were several of the people who are alive because of him.
We renew our commitment to this subject because we are convinced of the role the University holds in promoting organ donation.
Each year the congress returns to Messina, and each year someone tells their own story from the platform: a mother who donated, a person who received, a family that has been through both. Those testimonies sit in the programme alongside the scientific sessions.