Facebook Inc. took a momentous action last week. And I don’t mean its announced intention to sell shares for $28 to $35 in an initial public offering later this month.

Sally Satel M.D., author of When Altruism Isn't Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors, will be available for comment.

Today, over 92,000 people are waiting for organs--mostly kidneys--and each day eighteen of them will die before getting one.

Roughly 10% of all organ transplants in the world are obtained on the black market. A new investigation by puts a brutal face on that underground world.

Please note: This event has been canceled. At this event, Sally Satel, M.D., will discuss her new book, When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors and the national organ shortage.

In October of 2009, Kumud Majumder, the father of an 11-year-old son with advanced leukemia, joined a lawsuit challenging the federal ban on compensating bone-marrow donors. He wanted to save his son's life. Last week Mr. Majumder and his co-plaintiffs enjoyed a victory. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the majority of bone-marrow donors may lawfully be compensated.

This year, more than 100,000 Americans will be diagnosed with a potentially deadly blood disease. Among those in need of lifesaving, blood-producing marrow cells, thousands will die because it is so difficult to find a nearly perfect genetic match and marrow donors are in short supply.

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