Withdrawals from deceased donor registries

The NYT is standing by its recent stories on deceased organ donation. In the meantime  Newsweek has this story about people who have had second thoughts about deceased donation. (For the record, while it's very important to scrutinize current practices, none of the reported concerns even made me think about withdrawing from the donor registry.)

Mass Exodus From Organ Donor Registries Following Media Coverage  by Joshua Rhett Miller

"Thousands of Americans have removed themselves from organ donor registries following "irresponsible reporting" led by the New York Times, officials said.

The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, a trade group that represents 46 of the nation's 55 federally designated nonprofit entities that help facilitate donations, accused the newspaper of a "lack of balance and accuracy" in its recent coverage of the problems in the sprawling transplant system.

The letter, sent to three Times editors on Tuesday, cited two articles from July 20, including "A Push for More Organ Transplants Is Putting Donors at Risk," in which reporters Brian M. Rosenthal and Julie Tate detailed rushed or premature attempts to retrieve organs from patients who were, in some cases, still showing signs of life.

A third recent Times item, an op-ed written by three cardiologists in which they argue for a "new definition of death" to help alleviate the backlog of recipients in need of transplants, was not included in the letter. The essay has gone viral on X, with many users commenting it has made them rethink or actively change their status as organ donors. 

 

...

"AOPO claims both articles contained "serious factual inaccuracies," including the trade group attributing "any errors to hospitals" in the story written by Rosenthal and Tate. That phrase wasn't a part of AOPO's response to the newspaper, which subsequently updated the article, according to Tuesday's letter. 

"The main article from July 20 also omitted or misrepresented key facts in some donation cases," the letter continued. "The absence of critical context in the story has fueled massive mistrust in the donation process."

...

"This is the largest spike in registry removals ever recorded in the history of organ donation in the U.S.," AOPO letter reads. "The New York Times' coverage — coupled with a wave of secondary stories by other outlets and widespread, sensationalistic commentary and online reactions — has initiated a wave of panic and fear across the United States."

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Earlier:

Sunday, July 20, 2025Organ donation after circulatory death: the NYT recounts some disturbing cases

How the 1930's looked in 1930, in Haaretz---"Misjudgment of the Nazis"

 The future is the hardest thing to predict.

Here's a recent story in Haaretz, looking back at their reporting from Germany in 1930 (and how it evolved as the 1930's evolved...)

'They'll Never Put Their Madness Into Action': Haaretz's Misjudgment of the Nazis by Ofer Aderet, April 23, 2025

“ Covering the up-and-coming Nazis in early-'30s Germany, Haaretz journalist Gershon Swet reassured his readers that 'it's hard to believe that any government will be able to limit the equal rights of Jews.' His colleague Yeshayahu Klinov was more prescient
…
“ Swet wrote, "Their platform – a jumble of cheap demagoguery and profound ignorance – is far from being realized. … Hitler, Goebbels … and all the other thugs know very well that their proclamations, demands and howls are likely to have more impact on the street than in actual life."

Headlines that could have been dated April 1

 This year there's one headline that stands out from all the others:

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.  By Jeffrey Goldberg

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Back before the  November election, the headlines that seemed most Foolish were much more cheerful

 French pole vaulter video: Anthony Ammirati dislodges bar with penis, costing him medal opportunity at 2024 Olympics

    (And here's the video)

LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

 

The ethics of field experiments in Economics, in the Financial Times

 The Financial Times has a column about the recent twitter (X) discussion concerning our paper Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter, by Jingyi Qiu, Yan Chen, Alain Cohn, and Alvin E. Roth.

That twitter-up concerned whether it is ethical to do field experiments in economics, in which some argued that the benefits that might accrue to treated market participants may disadvantage untreated market participants, including those not involved in the experiment and from whom consent was not obtained. (The FT column has a paragraph in which Douglas MacKay*, a bio-ethicist from UNC considers ethical issues that might arise if the market "is a zero sum competition.") 

Here's the FT article, and the snippet that covers our paper.

When is it OK for economists to experiment on people? A recent study has raised ethical questions about research.  by Soumaya Keynes, Financial Times.

"While most economic debates are about as spicy as boiled potatoes, others generate a bit more heat. A recent stir fell into the second category, in response to a new study of junior academics angling for jobs in economics. 

...

"Alvin Roth, one of the authors of that experiment, says: “I can’t imagine economists thinking of a market as zero sum.” Perhaps a social media post could alert someone to a candidate so impressive that they persuade their university to make an extra position available. He points out that plenty of people share papers on social media, adding: “It seems to me that things that aren’t unethical to do shouldn’t be unethical to study to find out their effect.”

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Here's my earlier post, of the paper, with some thoughts on the ethics of experimenting.

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter, by Qiu, Chen, Cohn, and Roth

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*And here is an interesting looking bibliography, including some papers by economists.

Ethics of Field Experiments: A Bibliography

Prepared and Managed by Emma Cohn and Douglas MacKay

Snowden and state surveillance: the view from The Guardian, ten years later

 Here's a look back at the Snowden affair (publication of documents about government surveillance) by the then editor in chief of the Guardian, one of the newspapers that took the lead.

Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future by Alan Rusbridger

"one story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.

"The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens.

...this was but the tip of a very large and ominous iceberg.

...

"the Guardian (joined by the Washington Post, New York Times and ProPublica) led the way in publishing dozens more documents disclosing the extent to which US, UK, Australian and other allied governments were building the apparatus for a system of mass surveillance

...

"It led to multiple court actions in which governments were found to have been in breach of their constitutional and/or legal obligations. It led to a scramble by governments to retrospectively pass legislation sanctioning the activities they had been covertly undertaking. And it has led to a number of stable-door attempts to make sure journalists could never again do what the Guardian and others did 10 years ago.

"Even now the British government, in hastily revising the laws around official secrecy, is trying to ensure that any editor who behaved as I did 10 years ago would face up to 14 years in prison.

...

"The British government believed that, by ordering the destruction of the Guardian computers, they would effectively silence us. In fact, we simply transferred the centre of publications to New York, under ​the paper’s then US editor, Janine Gibson.

...

"The notion that the state has no right to enter a home and seize papers was established in English law in the famous case of Entick v Carrington (1765), which later became the basis for the US fourth amendment. In a famous passage, Lord Camden declared: “By the laws of England, every invasion of private property, be it ever so minute, is a trespass.”

"When I went out to talk about the Snowden case to assorted audiences (including, after a suitable gap, at MI5 itself), I would begin by asking who in the audience would be happy to hand over all their papers to a police officer knocking on their front door, even if they assured them they would only examine them if there was sufficient cause.

"Never, in any of these talks, did a single member of any audience raise a hand. Yes, people valued their security and were open to persuasion that, with due process and proper oversight, there would be occasions when the state and its agencies should be granted intrusive powers​ in specific circumstances​. But the idea of blanket, suspicionless surveillance – give us the entire haystack and we’ll search for the needle if and when it suits us – was repellent to most people."

Headlines that could have appeared on April 1

 Grim news largely crowded out funny news this past 12 months, but not completely (and some grim news is also funny).

National Park Service Asks Visitors to Please Stop Licking Toads (NYT, Nov, 2022)

Wyoming lawmakers propose ban on electric vehicle sales (The Hill, 01/16/23) "A group of GOP Wyoming state lawmakers want to end electric vehicle sales there by 2035, saying the move will help safeguard the oil and gas industries."

Sex on the beach: pressures of extreme polygamy may be driving southern elephant seals to early death (Guardian, March 2023)

Idaho governor signs firing squad execution bill into law, AP, March 25, 2023. "... making Idaho the latest state to turn to older methods of capital punishment amid a nationwide shortage of lethal-injection drugs. ...firing squads will be used only if the state cannot obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections.

Radical content on YouTube, in PNAS

 Here's a paper in PNAS which finds that YouTube viewing of politically radical content reflects viewers' other web behavior, rather than being driven by the YouTube recommender system.

Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube by Homa Hosseinmardi,  Amir Ghasemian,   Aaron Clauset,   Markus Mobius,   eDavid M. Rothschild, and   Duncan J. Watts. 

PNAS August 10, 2021 118 (32) e2101967118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101967118

Abstract: Although it is under-studied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube’s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical “anti-woke” channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of “anti-woke” content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.

"Our data are drawn from Nielsen’s nationally representative desktop web panel, spanning January 2016 through December 2019 (SI Appendix, section B), which records individuals’ visits to specific URLs. We use the subset of N = 309,813 panelists who have at least one recorded YouTube pageview. Parsing the recorded URLs, we found a total of 21,385,962 watched-video pageviews (Table 1). We quantify the user’s attention by the duration of in-focus visit to each video in total minutes (32)."

Headlines that could have appeared April 1

 You can't make these things up:

Murderer who tackled London Bridge attacker with narwhal tusk pardoned

Wild Mountain Thyme trailer blamed for Irish accent

A Chinese County Aims to Curb Dog Walking by Threatening to Kill the Dog

Denmark launches children's TV show about man with giant penis

Thieves pelt French police with Burgundy wine in motorway chase

Dutch officials seize ham sandwiches from British drivers

India NDTV interview on coronavirus, convalescent plasma, etc. (5 minute interview by Dr. Prannoy Roy)

My 5 minutes come at 1:12, but if I've embedded this right the video should begin from there when you start it...

Headlines that could be dated April 1

Something was in the air this year: many headlines in serious outlets struck me as appropriate for April Fools Day.

Non-political ones come first:

Coffee beans not vital for human survival, Switzerland decides

Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, county coroner is forced to confirm

The Ohio State University wants to trademark its favorite word: ‘The’

"officials filed Application No. 88571984 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week, seeking a trademark for the word “THE” to use it on items including T-shirts, caps and hats."



Bodyguard to Saudi king reportedly shot dead by friend
...with friends like these...

A Prisoner Who Briefly Died Argues That He’s Served His Life Sentence

A court in Iowa found that a murderer who was revived “is either still alive, in which case he must remain in prison, or he is actually dead, in which case this appeal is moot.”

Investors who lost $190m demand exhumation of cryptocurrency mogul
Canadian company founder took crucial password to the grave

Are vegetables vegan?

Wisconsin town to legalize snowball fights after 50-year ban

Judge blocks California’s alligator ban after Louisiana sues

Why is Gwyneth Paltrow selling a candle that smells like her vagina?

‘Mad’ Mike Hughes, who vowed to prove the flat-Earth theory, dies in homemade-rocket disaster

Alabama bill may lift yoga ban in public schools but prohibit 'namaste' greeting

Nevada Brothels Requiring Customers To Wear Masks

Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device

Turkmenistan Has Banned Use Of The Word 'Coronavirus'


And a special section of (American) politics, if you can call it that:

Donald Trump’s interest in buying Greenland stuns Denmark
‘Greenland is not for sale, and can’t be sold,’ says island’s government

Trump cancels Denmark trip after PM says Greenland is not for sale
President says he is postponing meeting with Mette Frederiksen because she was not interested in discussing transaction

Trump blasts report claiming he wanted to nuke hurricanes

Trump border wall between US and Mexico blows over in high winds

Trump’s border wall, vulnerable to flash floods, needs large storm gates left open for months

Sarah Palin stuns TV viewers by rapping Baby Got Back dressed as a bear

Organ and tissue procurement: back and forth between LA Times and OneLegacy

Even in the era of social media, it remains difficult to conduct an argument with someone who buys ink by the truckload.

The LA Times ran a series of stories on tissue procurement:
Full Coverage: The Times’ investigation into how companies that harvest body parts upend death investigations

This was followed by a press release from OneLegacy, the big S. California organ procurement organization (OPO), disputing a number of points and objecting to the overall tone of the articles:
Inaccurate and Sensationalized Los Angeles Times Article Likely to Cause Unnecessary Deaths and Suffering
"—A highly-inaccurate and tragically sensationalized article in a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times is likely to lead to deaths and suffering while causing severe damage to the donation and transplantation community."

and this in turn was followed by a rejoinder in the LA Times:
OneLegacy issued a statement on an L.A. Times investigation; The Times responds
By MELODY PETERSEN OCT. 27, 2019
"“The Times stands firmly behind these important stories, which were the product of months of meticulous reporting and careful editing,” said Scott Kraft, managing editor of The Times."

Headlines that could be dated April 1

Green-haired turtle that breathes through its genitals added to endangered list
With its punky green mohican the striking Mary river turtle joins a new ZSL list of the world’s most vulnerable reptiles

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Clipping Study of Male Organ Size
Professor halts study on link between size and self-esteem, saying publicity hurt her effort.

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Sorry, Dutch Pastafarians, but you still can’t wear a colander on your government ID ... yet

"De Wilde, 32, is a Dutch law student who subscribes to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism. But this week, the Netherlands' Council of State determined that her belief system doesn’t count as religion and thus rejected request to keep the pasta strainer on her head in her government ID photos."
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Maine officials say getting lobsters stoned with marijuana before killing them is illegal
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Florida gas station owner’s microwave sign: ‘Do not warm urine’
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Indian airport police told to cut down on smiling
"They will move from a "broad smile system" to a "sufficient smile system", the Indian Express says."
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10 stomachs, 32 brains and 18 testicles – a day inside the UK's only leech farm
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US troops drink Iceland capital’s entire beer supply in one weekend
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Woman ticketed for not holding escalator handrail to be heard by Supreme Court [Canada]
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Blind creature that buries head in sand named after Donald Trump
"A newly discovered blind and burrowing amphibian is to be officially named Dermophis donaldtrumpi, in recognition of the US president’s climate change denial."
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Tesla Model 3 driver again dies in crash with trailer, Autopilot not yet ruled out
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A Doping Scandal In Bridge? The World's Top Player Fails Drug Test
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French couple barred from calling son Griezmann Mbappe after football heroes
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World’s Most Expensive Perfume Available for US$1.3 Million
"Dubbed SHUMUKH (meaning “deserving the highest” in Arabic), the unisex perfume sits in a bottle adorned with 3,571 diamonds (totaling 38.55 carats) and other pieces of gold, silver, pearls, and topaz, and it can be customized with even further jewels, according to the company.
The perfume is currently on display at The Dubai Mall through March 30."

School choice in Washington D.C., by Thomas Toch in the Washington Post magazine

In the Washington Post magazine, Thomas Toch writes about the accomplishments and limitations of the school choice system in Washington D.C., and school choice more generally. He's a thoughtful observer of the education scene, and the director of FutureEd. (I gather that the piece is only online now and will be in print on Saturday...)

The Lottery That’s Revolutionizing D.C. Schools
by Thomas Toch.  Photos by Evelyn Hockstein, MARCH 20, 2019

The whole thing is worth reading.  Here's the concluding paragraph:

"In forcing traditional public schools to compete more directly, the common enrollment system has pressed them to strengthen themselves, as Henderson suggests. It has made school choice fairer and more efficient. And it has changed the dynamic between Washington’s public and private schools. Families are finding public Montessori programs, dual-language opportunities like Noah’s and other options that were offered mainly in the private sector in the past. But the long wait lists at some schools and empty spots at others that the My School DC lottery has produced make clear that the success of school choice in Washington will ultimately require creating more strong schools. “If we don’t have capacity in A-plus schools for all the kids, then some kids aren’t going to go to A-plus schools,” Roth told me. “No system of choice can fix that.”

First-person account of a four-way kidney exchange in Houston, in the WSJ

Here's a moving first-person account by journalist Yogita Patel in the Wall Street Journal, about her decision to donate a kidney to her brother, through kidney exchange.

I Gave My Kidney to a Stranger to Save My Brother’s Life
By Yogita Patel, March 9, 2019

It's full of interesting introspection. Here's one bit:
"As I expressed my growing concerns, my brother quietly acknowledged to other family members some of his own doubts. “I wasn’t sure if it would always be something you’d hold over me,” he recently admitted. I wasn’t sure, either."

I was also interested in a technical part of the story about the lengths that Houston Methodist Hospital goes to try to perform all the kidney exchange transplants they do internally, i.e. at their own hospital.  In this case, a four-pair exchange was assembled over a period of months, that included at least one non-directed donor who participated in the exchanges, which all took place on the same day.

"Houston Methodist first aims to create a donor chain without other hospitals—its longest involved 12 people. If appropriate matches fail to come together, the hospital expands the search regionally, then ultimately to a national registry that helped create a 30-pair swap the hospital took part in eight years ago.
...
"As months went by, our small network continued to come together behind the scenes.
...
"Twice, Pesh got word from his coordinator that it was nearly go time in what turned out to be false alarms.As the wait dragged on, he made two trips to the ICU because of complications tied to dialysis. Each episode left him fearing that the prospect of a donation was fading.

"Finally in June, we got word that they had found matches for both of us. Our four-pair exchange took place on the same day, Aug. 7, with everyone having surgery at Houston Methodist."

Kidney exchange chains and altruistic kidney donation on PBS newshour

PBS economics correspondent Paul Solman interviews non-directed kidney donors, and kidney exchange patients, and me, in yesterday's PBS newshour.

Here's a link to video of the 10 minute segment on kidneys, including a transcript.
How an economist’s idea to create kidney transplant chains has saved lives

and here's the video itself:

The show talks about how a single altruistic donor can initiate a long chain of kidney transplants that helps many people.

The kidney exchange organization that started non-simultaneous non-directed donor chains is the Alliance for Paired Donation, run by Mike Rees, and I think that they still organize the longest chains, i.e. the ones with the highest average number of transplants.  

The very first long chain was reported in this article in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Rees, Michael A., Jonathan E. Kopke, Ronald P. Pelletier, Dorry L. Segev, Matthew E. Rutter, Alfredo J. Fabrega, Jeffrey Rogers, Oleh G. Pankewycz, Janet Hiller, Alvin E. Roth, Tuomas Sandholm, Utku Ünver, and Robert A. Montgomery, “A Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain,” New England Journal of Medicine, 360;11, March 12, 2009

Here's the full hour-long newshour: kidneys are from about minute 34:46 to minute 44:38 on the video below.

Headlines that could have been dated April 1

A woman tried to board a plane with her emotional-support peacock. United wouldn't let it fly.

Hundreds of Canadian doctors demand lower salaries

Academic Conferences May Save Lives — by Keeping Big-Name Doctors Busy

French waiter says firing for rudeness is 'discrimination against my culture'
Guillaume Rey filed a complaint after being dismissed from a Canada restaurant for being ‘aggressive, rude and disrespectful’

The Economist discusses repugnant transactions

It's good to see repugnant transactions and forbidden markets making it into the (semi-)popular press.  Here's an article from The Economist, in part about my presidential address at the American Economic Association meetings in January.

Economists cannot avoid making value judgments
Lessons from the “repugnant” market for organs

It's nice to be quoted, not so nice to be misunderstood. Here's a sentence in which I object to the words "but mostly."

"Repugnance, he laments, tilts the political playing field against ideas that unlock the gains from trade. He recommends that economists spend more time thinking about such taboos, but mostly because they are a constraint on the use of markets in new contexts."

In fact I think that repugnant transactions are important for social scientists to study. (By "repugnant transactions" I mean transactions that some people would like to engage in while others think they should be forbidden, and for which there are no easily measurable negative effects on non-participants.)   For example, when you see laws all over the world against compensating kidney donors, it suggests that there are widespread perceptions that we economists would do well to understand, because understanding how and why markets enjoy social support is important.

Of course, repugnance sometimes constrains markets in ways that I regret. But not always: I'm not in favor of bringing back indentured servitude, for example.

Some of the misunderstanding of my talk seems to stem from how it was blogged about and live tweeted by Professor Beatrice Cherrier, of whom the Economist says

"But, as Beatrice Cherrier of the Institute for New Economic Thinking argued in an essay addressing Mr Roth’s lecture, these questions are fundamental to economics. The hard sciences deal much better with the ethical implications of their work, she says. And moral concerns affect human behaviour in economically important ways, as Mr Roth found to his frustration. To be useful, economists need to learn to understand and evaluate moral arguments rather than dismiss them."

She blogs as The Undercover Historian, and you can read her take on my lecture at the link below (worth reading, but she certainly never talked to me about what I think, and seems to me to have heard what she came to hear, rather than what I said...)

Not going away: on Al Roth’s 2018 AEA Presidential Address and the ethical shyness of market designers  Posted on January 7, 2018


You can hear (and see) my talk for yourself here:

AEA Presidential Address - Marketplaces, Markets and Market Design
Alvin E. Roth, introduced by Olivier Blanchard
View Webcast

I certainly don't dismiss repugnance: I wish I understood it better. You can see some of the things I'd like to understand by looking at my posts about repugnance on this blog. (As I write this, I see that I have 921 posts tagged with the label "repugnance")

I should add that I am often disappointed in the ethics literature that tries to address the appropriate scope of markets, and of economic transactions.  Much of it seems deaf to the idea that there may be tradeoffs that need to be considered when we contemplate public policies. You don't have to be a strict utilitarian to think that sometimes it may be reasonable to tolerate a small amount of harm in order to relieve a large amount of harm. (See my recent posts about harm reduction.)

In some organ transplantation circles, the version of the trolley problem that strikes a chord has to do with the universal agreement that if a hospital has eight patients facing imminent death due to lack of available organs, you still can't order a pizza and murder the delivery man for his organs, so that there will be one death instead of eight.

But some of the discussion in the ethics literature, which concludes that most attempts to increase transplants are ethically suspect, reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon. The picture shows what looks like a board of directors meeting, and the man at the head of the table asks
"Yes, it would save many lives. But to what end?"

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Update: The Economist strikes back, see

Monday, May 7, 2018

I am slandered (or at least misunderstood) by The Economist for writing about repugnant transactions

You would think that writers for a magazine/newspaper called The Economist would read some economics before writing about it.

Talking to nephrologists about kidney exchange

Most conversations about kidney exchange (aka kidney paired donation, kpd) are with transplant professionals. But kidney patients start out being referred to a nephrologist, and so it was good to be able to talk to nephrologists at the recent meeting of the National Kidney Foundation.

My talk was about how kidney exchange has made a lot of progress, and become a standard part of transplantation, but that there's still room for it to grow and help more patients get transplants.   In that regard I focused on two recent initiatives, starting a non-directed donor chain with a deceased donor kidney, and global kidney exchange to bring developing world patient-donor pairs into American kidney exchange to the mutual benefit of both kinds of pairs.

Here's a news story from Nephrology News (with a headline that unfortunately disses the many pioneers of kidney exchange):

Father of kidney exchange says it’s time for a refresh

And here's a story that focuses on starting kidney exchange chains with a deceased donor kidney, from the Dutch Nier nieuws (Kidney news)

'Start donatieketting met overleden donor'
("Start donation chain with deceased donor")

Headlines that could have run on April 1

What was he thinking? Plane passenger stopped at Stansted with iPhone case shaped like a gun

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Pretender to France's non-existent throne embroiled in succession row 

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Icelandic president admits he does not have the legal authority to ban pineapple on pizza
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A Paid Hour a Week for Sex? Swedish Town Considers It

Headlines that could have been published on April 1

You can't make this stuff up...

College Will No Longer Ask Students to Examine One Another's Vaginas 

Woman discovers 'boyfriend' of two years is woman when she removes blindfold during sex

No Turkish fabric to make anti-Turkish T-shirts, say Russian designers

Sanctions imposed after downing of military plane are hindering production of patriotic garments, reports The Moscow Times

Thai Man May Go to Prison for Insulting King’s Dog


Driving instructors 'may offer lessons in return for sex', Netherlands government confirms
The practice, known as 'ride for a ride', has been deemed 'legal but undesirable'

Mexico City officially changes its name to – Mexico City