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Latest Newsletter
October 2024
Thirty years ago, on assignment for a national women’s magazine, I visited Bodega Bay for the first time to interview the parents of Nicholas Green, a seven-year-old boy who became an international hero and unofficial patron saint of organ donation.
“Piccolo Nicola” (little Nicholas), as Italians call him, was killed by bandits’ gunfire as his family drove through southern Italy in the autumn of 1994. In their darkest hour, Reginald and Maggie Green donated his organs, saving or transforming the lives of seven Italians.
What struck me—and millions of others around the world —were the Greens’ generosity of spirit, rejection of bitterness and commitment, as his mother put it, to make “something good come out of something that was so senseless.” Nicholas’s liver went to a comatose nineteen-year-old woman who recovered, married and named her son for him. A frail 15-year-old boy with a lethal cardiac condition joyfully compared his new heart to a Ferrari. Thanks to Nicholas’s donated cornea, a young mother was able to see her baby for the first time.
The Nicholas effect, as it became known, extended far beyond these recipients. Italy’s rate of organ and tissue donations, once among the lowest in Europe, has tripled. More than 150 schools, streets, piazze, parks, an amphitheater, a bridge and an intensive care unit in Italy bear Nicholas’s name. His story has inspired books, poems, paintings, sculptures, a television movie and a global foundation.
