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Designing ethical policies is illustrated with two real examples. The first, allocating cadaver kidneys for transplantation, needs to develop a policy that satisfies the two conflicting fundamental values of equality and efficiency. Equality would require a lottery or a first-come, first-served policy. Efficiency would allocate kidneys to the candidates who would benefit the most. Because neither value may be dismissed, the values must be compromised. That compromise happens in two ways: by compromising the values of equality and efficiency within a policy at a time, and by cycling across policies over time, shifting the preference given to the two values back-and-forth. The second example is an illuminating account of how the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England and Wales designed a deliberative process for assessing the cost effectiveness of health care technologies.

This chapter applies Kantian principles to the issue of the moral permissibility of “live donor” kidney transplantation—specifically cases in which, in exchange for money, someone undergoes a kidney extraction. The chapter specifies contexts (e.g. “transplant tourism”) in which such market exchange of kidneys often involves a failure to respect the dignity of persons, according both to an orthodox Kantian account of dignity and to a newly developed one. The chapter also examines market exchange in light of the notion, familiar in bioethics, that autonomy has intrinsic value. The chapter argues that if, in a Kantian spirit, one values autonomy, then one should be wary of markets in organs. The chapter argues that market exchange of kidneys—even consensual, legal, and regulated exchange that would increase the number of kidneys available for transplant—would often be morally wrong. The chapter briefly considers alternative means of reducing the current shortage of organs.

This commentary aims to examine Aulisio and Deming’s discussion of justification of living donation. First, this commentary compares living donor organ transplantation trends in the U.S. and Japan. In the second section, the authors examine Aulisio and Deming’s discussion on ethical concerns specific to each paradigm of living organ donation, giving reference to the situation and cases in Japan. In the last section, the authors address the ethical challenges posed by living donor organ transplantation itself. The authors then conclude that justification of living organ donation will remain an ethical challenge as long as living organ donation constitutes “prima facie harm” to donors, even if the donation system is improved in an ideal way.

This chapter discusses a system for screening living donors. The chapter begins with a narrative of the author as she was anxiously waiting to hear whether the Transplant Selection Committee at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was going to approve her as a kidney donor. It then recounts the author's decision to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger. A few months earlier, she had read an article in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle about a woman who needed a kidney. The article detailed how Deb Porter Gill had been diagnosed with insulin dependent diabetes and developed unrelated chronic kidney disease. The chapter narrates the reasons why Deb's story tugged at the author. Ultimately, the chapter looks at the importance of the whole series of evaluation and screening in kidney transplantation.

Verbatim descriptions of the use of the homospatial process in creative discovery are given by Owen Chamberlain on the particle counter he developed to identify the antiproton, Norman Ramsey on the hydrogen maser, Donald Glaser on the bubble chamber used to detect particle collisions, Walter Gilbert on continuous replication in the molecule and the “Rolling Circle Model of Genetic Replication,” Pierre-Gilles de Gennes on reptation in lubricants, Dudley Herschbach on bond breaking and making, Luis Alvarez on dinosaur extinction, Joshua Lederberg on bacterial conjugation, Robert Huber on the crystal structure of the photosynthesis reaction center, Jean-Marie Lehn on chemical self-representation, William Lipscomb on borane structure, Glenn Seaborg on plutonium and actinide placement of transuranic elements in the periodic table, and Joseph Murray on kidney transplantation.

Scientific discoveries are all, to some degree, collaborations with colleagues who have various affiliations. The subjects in the research group whose primary work was consistently or significantly interconnected with others were John Kendrew (with Max Perutz) on the structure of myoglobin; Konrad Bloch (with Edward Tatum and Feodor Lynen) on the structure of cholesterol and fatty acids; Emilio Segrè (with Owen Chamberlain, Clyde Wiegand, Thomas Ypsilanti) on the antiproton; and Joseph Murray (with Francis Moore, George Thorpe, Roy Calne, George Hitchens, Gertrude Elion) on kidney transplantation. The collaborative role of the individual Nobel laureates interviewed is described. The collaborations of all of the Nobel laureates were based on intense desires for learning and capacity for teaching.