[NYTimes] When Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, appeared in public recently for the first time in months, he revealed that he had received a liver transplant from the victim of a car crash. “I wouldn’t be here without such generosity,” Mr. Jobs said, adding that he hoped that many people would become organ donors.  [...]

The seamy underside of the organ transplant business made the news recently when Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman, was arrested on accusations of trying to broker the purchase of a kidney for $160,000.
That the organ shortage is so great in this country that people are resorting to buying and selling kidneys is not a surprise; [...]

[Huffington Post] Just a little while ago, GOP Rep. Steve Scalise from Louisiana was riven with concern over the terrifying prospect of government intervention in health care. He came armed with a sob story that really just goes to show the lengths to which people will go to obfuscate the underlying issues.
SCALISE: When you look [...]

[NYT] JUNE 30, 2009 – Need a kidney? You may be able to buy one in Pakistan, which has become one of the world’s largest “kidney bazaars,” according to an article published in the May-June issue of The Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal.
But who sells their kidneys, and what becomes of these people afterwards? The article, [...]

[WSJ Health Blog] Can a sperm bank be sued for selling sperm that causes a child to be born with a genetic disease? Yes, a federal judge has ruled. Here’s the opinion.
The case was brought on behalf of a 13-year-old girl with fragile X syndrome, a common inherited form of mental retardation.
While the judge dismissed [...]

[The Star] Dead is dead, except when it’s not.
“Death used to be a little more self-evident,” says Kerry Bowman, a medical ethicist specializing in end of life issues at the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics.
“Today, you’re dead when the doctor says you are.”
Deciding when somebody is dead or about to die is quickly [...]

A long Island man, Richard Batista, is demanding his kidney back after  donating it to his wife Dawnell in 2001 after two previous failed transplants.
Despite telling the New York Daily News that there is “no value you can put on an organ when it saves someone’s life. There is no greater feeling on this planet,”  he is suing Dawnell [...]

An embryonic stem cell and an adult stem cell report topped today’s bioethics news. 
As for the embryonic stem cell news, Obama appointed bioethicist R. Alta Charo, a UW-Madison researcher and previous member of former President Bill Clinton’s Bioethics Advisory Commission, to his Health and Human Services team.  A proponent of embryonic stem cell research, Alta Charo [...]

[ABC] A terminally ill British teenager has won the right to die after she was taken to court by a hospital that wanted to force her to have a heart transplant.
Thirteen-year-old Hannah Jones has been in and out of hospital for most of the past 10 years, but now she has refused any more operations [...]

Brain Death remains a valid criteria for defining death, states a nine page Vatican statement (2006) signed by prominent theologians and bioethicists including Cardinals Cottier, Trujillo and Martini and Bishop Sgreccia.  Nonetheless, debates continue regarding when life ends, similar to the debates of when life begins.  
As of June 2007, there were roughly 97,000 people awaiting organ transplants, in [...]