. A report last week in the New York Times of a pig heart transplant performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center exemplifies a common myopic view of xenotransplantation research.

“Between the time of my heart transplant and the moment my hair began to fall out, I arguably had suffered enough,” writes Leilani R. Graham. “Transplant brought four open-heart surgeries, ten days on ECMO, an intra-aortic balloon pump, delirium, necrotizing pneumonia, and so much muscular atrophy that I had to re-learn how to walk. [Transplant] was not the miracle I was hoping for.”

One of the most important aspects of the Canada's medical aid-in-dying process is the respect given for the patients’ wishes concerning organ donation. People dying of other causes should be shown the same respect.

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,...

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.