We believe that the concept of brain death, though flawed in its present application, can be preserved and promoted as a pathway to organ donation, but only after particular changes are made in the medical criteria for its diagnosis.

News of the first transplant of a pig’s heart into a human raises hope that the procedure could one day help alleviate the shortage of organs. But before we forge ahead with xenotransplantation trials, we should be concerned about several issues: the potential to spread pathogens, exploitation of human research participants, and animal welfare.

A remarkable experiment raises anew questions about whether brain-death is really death.

There is a growing call for the lifetime risk of living kidney donation to be disclosed to prospective donors. This information is essential for informed consent.

In the more than 35 years since federal legislation created organ procurement organizations (OPOs) to recover organs from deceased donors for transplantation, there has been a disparity in their performance, with the best OPOs recovering organs from four times as many donors as the worst OPOs by obj...

Several years ago, one of us decided to donate a kidney to someone who needed one. She didn’t anticipate the difficulties that would arise from the process by which donors are evaluated.

More than 100,000 people in this country are waiting for a life-saving transplant and on average 30 people die each day while waiting. The nonprofit organizations responsible for coordinating organ transplants between donors and recipient could be doing more to lower these numbers. A new government proposal designed to more closely regulate OPOs could, in some respects, actually make the situation worse.

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...

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...