While the U.S. system of organ donation and transplantation is in a state of growth for the fifth year in a row, the call for new strategies to accelerate that progress has never been more robust as the critical need for transplantable organs continues to far exceed the supply. In an article in the M...

Defining Death: Organ Transplantation and the 50-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death, the 2018 Harvard Medical School’s Annual Bioethics Conference, took place from April 11 to 13 in Boston. An annual event of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics, this year’s confe...

Do the recipients of organ transplants have a right to know if the organs they are about to receive were part of a research study? If so, are the recipients themselves research subjects? A recent article in the Hastings Center Report maintains that the recipients do have a right to know, but that the...

Three weeks ago, my dear friend Jackie, a internationally recognized bioethicist in her fifties who lives in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, went to bed with what she thought was a bad case of flu. A few days later she was really ill, and her partner and another dear friend persuaded her to go to an emergency c...

If the mutilated body of one of your research subjects is discovered in a blood-soaked bathroom, who should investigate the death?  If you want to be cleared of blame, it’s useful if the investigation is led by a colleague from your own department.  If you were being paid by a drug company to ...