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Starting today, any North Carolinian who wants to be an organ, eye or tissue donor can register online to do so.

Are you an organ donor? If so, why? If not, why not? Join the discussion at the Debatables blog.

The service, the Organ, Tissue and Eye Online Registry, is at www.verybigheart.com. It is offered by Donate Life North Carolina, the group making up the state's three organ-procurement organizations.

The service is aimed at reducing the backlog of more than 98,000 people nationwide awaiting organ or tissue transplants.

For years, state residents have been able to state their intent to be organ donors when they obtained or renewed driver's licenses — the intent is symbolized by a heart icon on the driver's license. But permission of next of kin was still needed for the donation to take place.

In 2007, the legislature rewrote state law to recognize that stated intent as legally binding. But people only renew their licenses every five to eight years.

"At this point a person can agree to be an organ, eye or tissue donor by going to (the Division of Motor Vehicles)," said Dawn Hall, director of communications and marketing for organ-procurement agency Carolina Donor Services. "But we want to make sure any North Carolinian can go at any time and register."

The registry will be synchronized with organ-donor data collected by DMV, Hall said. Data will be securely stored, she said, and only officials of the organ procurement agencies will have access to it.

The site's official launch today is in observation of April as National Donate Life Month.

Using a $141,104 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Donate Life North Carolina is mounting a large publicity campaign, including ads in movie theaters, on radio stations and on the popular Web sites Google and Yahoo.

The campaign also will include stickers on the doors in the orange juice section of grocery stores.

Hall said that's because market researchers have found that African Americans drink disproportionately more frozen orange juice than other ethnic groups. They also make up a disproportionately large segment of people waiting for transplants.

The ethnicity matters because, all other factors being equal, an organ transplanted into a person of the same race as the donor is less likely to be rejected than that from someone of a different race, Hall said.

Organizers hope the promotion will increase the pool of registered donors by 20 percent, or more than 600,000 people, by the end of 2008.

"We want it to be well over that, but that was the number they charged us with" when the government awarded the grant, Hall said.

Contact Lex Alexander at 373-7088 or lex.alexander@news-record.com