This is the story of how a seven-year old American boy, Nicholas Green, was shot in a botched robbery while traveling along a major highway in the south of Italy on a family vacation, how his parents, Reg and Maggie Green, donated his organs and corneas to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers and how that decision changed the views of millions of people around the world about organ donation.
In Italy alone donation rates in the next 10 years tripled, a rate of increase no other country has ever come close to so that thousands of people are alive there who would now be dead. Newspaper and television channels around the world covered the story and its aftermath: an increase in understanding worldwide of the power of a single decision to save multiple lives. "The Nicholas Effect" describes every stage in how this one decision changed the world's view of what until then had been to most people an obscure and frightening surgical procedure. It tells how the seven recipients, some on the point of death, resumed their lives, including one who had a baby four years later and called him Nicholas.
It tells how the Green family adapted to life without Nicholas including the birth of twins to Maggie, two years after Nicholas' death and how Nicholas' sister, Eleanor, four years old at the time of the shooting, found the strength to overcome his loss and deal with the whirlwind in which meeting celebrities and photo sessions with leading politicians became a way of life.
The book covers the arrest, trial and conviction of two Mafia men who had attacked the Greens' rented car because they thought it was carrying a cargo of jewelry. It describes in detail the making of a made-for-television movie, "Nicholas' Gift," starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Alan Bates which has been seen by a hundred million people worldwide. It ends on a note of hope, reflecting on the much-increased numbers of people around the world who are now willing to donate a loved one's organs to complete strangers.
Green, Reginald: - Reg Green is a British-born journalist who was the chief business writer of the (London) Daily Telegraph. He was also an economics writer with the (London) Times and the Guardian and a freelance commentator for the BBC. In 1970 he emigrated to the United States in 1970 and, after working in financial public relations, started and edited a financial newsletter. His life changed in 1994 when his seven-year old son, Nicholas, was shot in an attempted robbery while on a family vacation in Italy. He and his wife, Maggie, donated Nicholas' organs to seven Italians and changed the way Italy thought about organ donation. Until then Italy has almost the lowest donation rate in Western Europe. In the 10 years after Nicholas was killed, donation rates there tripled, a rate of growth no other country had ever come close to, and thousands of people are alive who would have died. Around the world tens of millions of people learned for the first time of the power of organ donation to save multiple lives. Since the transplant Reg has worked virtually every day to increase awareness of the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have been caused worldwide by the shortage of donated organs. Besides "The Nicholas Effect," he has written another book, "The Gift that Heals, ' that has been used by hospitals and educators around world to introduce doctors, nurses and the public to what organ donation can achieve. He has written dozens of articles and given television interviews for some of the best-known media outlets in the world.
