Robert Wilson Morgan’s medical sci-fi thriller, Chimera Conflict, begins with the scattered thoughts and memories of Roger Scully, who has been in some kind of horrible accident, and he struggles to maintain consciousness, let alone move his body or speak. He manages to hear a doctor tell him he’s in China, and he also hears that doctor call him by the name Zicheng. After he’s had a few days more to recover, a nurse helps Scully to the bathroom:

He glanced, then stared at the bathroom mirror. “What? Who is that?” he screamed. “What’s going on?” Words came from the mouth of a bearded dark-haired man. He grimaced. “Agghhh. I am not that man. Is this a terrible trick?” Panic overwhelmed him; he grabbed the sides of the sink to steady himself as his body shook with a combination of fear and weakness. He wanted to call it another hallucination, like the frequently flashing lights.

But it is no hallucination. Scully, whose memories are foggy after the procedure, learns that after sustaining serious injuries from a car accident, he agreed to go to China and be the first person to ever be transplanted into an entirely new body. He now lives in the body of a Chinese man of Uyghur descent, who was a prisoner in China before he died. Learning to live under a new identity and deal with terrible racism and xenophobia, Scully fights to resume his career as an American doctor.

Kirkus Reviews calls Chimera Conflict “wildly thought-provoking” in its explorations of the human rights abuses inflicted upon the Uyghur people by the Chinese government, the deplorable state of the American organ donation system, and the ethical questions surrounding medical advancements that may not be too far in the future.

Morgan, who lives in a retirement community in Florida, is a retired primary care doctor and epidemiologist, so it was no struggle for him to write about scientific advancements. An avid reader of medical journals, when he read of a real Chinese medical team who were experimenting with head transplants, he was immediately intrigued. What would it be like to wake up in a different body? “I thought, Oh! My body’s giving up, what if I could just get my head moved? Somebody should write a book about that.”

With his medical background, he also made the connections to the many thorny ethical issues such a book would need to explore. The Chinese organ donation and transplant system does not follow the same ethical guidelines that the American system does. But the American organ transplant system is not without flaws. “We’re still seeing people die who need a kidney transplant,” he says, “and we’re seeing people whose kidneys are wasted when they die. We do not have a good system in this country for getting transplants to people who need them. This is a really important issue that we need to deal with in America.”

Thinking about organ transplants, Morgan naturally made the connection to the many abuses the Uyghur population have suffered at the hands of the Chinese government, including, allegedly, forced organ donation. “I’ve been following the reporting around Chinese organ transplants for some time,” he says, “and if you have any sort of interest in human rights issues, it’s clear that the Uyghur people are part of that story.”

After an extensive medical career, Morgan had enough medical journal writing under his belt that the idea of writing a book didn’t scare him. Nor did getting the many scientific details right. Citing the real documentation on the developments in the science of transplantation, Morgan argues that Chimera Conflict isn’t science fiction so much as a look into the very near future, if not the immediate present. He even enlisted the help of other medical professionals to fact-check the science in his book.

But a novel is more than its facts and its word count; there are characters, dialogue, and plot. “I’ve published about 80 scientific papers, but no one ever taught me how to write dialogue,” he says. “There were about two years in between getting the idea to write the book and actually getting it published.” In that time he worked with many editors and readers to help him get the story right. After all his hard work, Morgan is pleased to see that he’s gotten some favorable reviews, including gaining Kirkus’ praise that “the novel’s writing is fluid, the pacing brisk throughout, and the characters are well developed.”

More than getting good reviews, Morgan wanted to write Chimera Conflict to share his deep concern with the critical human rights issue of organ transplantation, both overseas and at home in the United States. “I’ve been following this issue for many years, and I’ve tried to write to my governor about changing our transplant laws so that more people get the organs they need,” he says. “But that’s been an exercise in frustration.”

Morgan found that channeling his concerns into writing a novel was much more rewarding than writing unanswered letters to politicians. He’s working on a sequel to the book, but he’s not sure if or when it will be finished. At this point in his life, he’s too appreciative of what he’s already accomplished to be concerned with what else he might do. “I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences in my life,” he says. “It’s mostly been fun!”

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.