[NYTimes]- David Aldridge of Los Angeles had a kidney transplant in 2006, but he will soon need another. Like many people living with H.I.V., he suffers from kidney damage, either from the virus or from the life-saving medications that keep it at bay.
Until recently, such patients did not receive transplants at all because doctors worried [...]

[Medscape] The proportion of organ donors from U.S. minority groups has increased substantially in the past 20 years, following national education efforts to raise awareness of the need, a new study finds.
Kidney transplants, for example, have a greater chance of success when the donor and recipient are as genetically similar as possible. But historically, organ [...]

[Medscape] — Recipients of hearts from donors who were homeless die sooner and at a higher rate than those getting hearts from donors who weren’t homeless, based on an analysis of the 2005–2009 experience at a major Los Angeles medical center.
The study, small and inconclusive, nonetheless also showed that three of the five early deaths [...]

[CNN] Scientists appear to have broken another barrier in stem cell research by creating a better research model to study human illnesses – a pig – actually 34 pigs.  It’s an important advance for research because pigs are much more like humans than other lab animals are.
The scientists did not clone the pigs – instead [...]

[abc] Britain is considering paying organ donors as a way of increasing the number of transplants carried out in the United Kingdom.
A consultation being run by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics is canvassing opinions from the public and professionals on different incentives which could be provided to potential donors. 
Ethicists will examine whether laws prohibiting [...]

[AP]  An American infertility clinic is offering free human eggs to one British participant for attending an informational seminar Wednesday in London.
The promotion, which has been described by some as a raffle, has sparked an ethical debate in Britain about whether women should be paid for their eggs — which is illegal in the European [...]

[Philly.com] Hey, buddy, can you spare a kidney?
What if you got $10,000 for your trouble? $100,000? Or more?
With 106,131 Americans now on waiting lists for an organ – 83,754 of them for kidneys – researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center sought to find out whether financial incentives would increase [...]

[Physorg] In what doctors described Wednesday as a world first, a Danish woman has given birth to two children after her fertility was restored using ovarian tissue that was removed, frozen, thawed and then reimplanted after cancer treatment.
It is being hailed as a breakthrough for young women whose hope of one day becoming mothers could [...]

[Reason.com] In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann as the chair of the new Bioethics Commission. Such commissions are charged with working through tough questions about intellectual property rights, the protection [...]

Call it a genetic patch job for worn lungs: Canadian researchers took donated lungs deemed too damaged to transplant and repaired them with outside-the-body gene therapy. It will take lots more research to see if the fix lasts, to find out if the lungs work as well back inside a body as they do inside [...]