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.

Many of the quandaries that plague transplant medicine flow from the need to ration scarce resources.

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

How many lives will recent criticism of the FDA by camera-keen congressmencost when promising new treatments are kept out the hands of patients who otherwise are going to die?

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.

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.