Deceased organ donation in China does not yet have overwhelming public support although receiving a deceased donor organ transplant does:
Hu, D., Wang, Y., Hu, Q. et al. Public attitudes and preferences on organ donation and allocation in china: a cross-sectional study. Sci Rep 16, 24995 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-54903-4
I follow the Tour de France, partly out of an interest in performance enhancing drugs. But from time to time other strategic kinds of doping are also discussed, as in altering the bikes rather than the bike riders.
In this connection, The Tour de France Femmes, the women's Tour, now has a discussion of bra doping, for better aerodynamics:
Bra doping at the women’s Tour de France
"This year’s Tour de France Femmes has been rocked by allegations that some riders are artificially exaggerating their bust size to gain an aerodynamic advantage.
Several women’s World Tour teams have raised concerns that cyclists on rival teams are padding their sports bras to give them a boost in time trials, according to leading Dutch cycling news site, WielerFlits.
"The practice of “chest fairing” – also known as “bra boosting” or “bra doping” – involves increasing the surface area of the chest to change the airflow around the torso. Other forms of chest fairing include placing a water bottle or radio receiver under your cycling jersey. This can reduce drag, potentially saving valuable seconds in a time trial, where aerodynamics are crucial.
An optimised chest fairing can reduce drag by as much as 3.6%, which could gain a time-trial cyclist at least 0.78 seconds every kilometre, according to research published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics in 2024. “You won’t gain tens of seconds,” said study lead Bert Blocken, an aerodynamics expert at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. But over a 20- to 30-km time trial, “it could save enough seconds to make the difference”.
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Earlier posts:
Agence France Presse (AFP) reports on the bike race, and speculates on the historical competition between drug takers and drug testers.
There was a time when only riders had to be tested for doping, but advances in electric motors and batteries mean that bikes too can be suspect. However it's the riders who get the most, increasingly sophisticated scrutiny.
I know you have been just about to buy my book Moral Economics, ever since it came out in May. But you don't need to charge blindly ahead, you can gather evidence first (something the book strongly suggests is a good general practice:). You can read the introduction and part of the first chapter (which happens to be on Sex), for free, on google books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Moral_Economics/rb2CEQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
And here is the table of contents (which, despite the alluring blue colors doesn't in fact contain any links:(
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And here's an Amazon link, where they stoop to actual commerce: Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work
I talk with Gemma Boothroyd, about Moral Economics and controversial markets in Canada, including medical aid in dying, about which she has a story of her own.
CANADALAND #1414 Repugnant Markets: Where Blood is Sold and Kidneys Swapped
“Sometimes the transplants weren't done in a sterile environment. They weren't done in a hospital. They were done in an apartment somewhere. There are some very bad black markets.” - Nobel Laureate economist Alvin Roth
Gemma Boothroyd Reporter
You can listen here. (but you have to listen to some ads too:(
Further Reading:
Host: Gemma Boothroyd
The forthcoming issue of PNAS (August 18, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 33) has a big set of papers on illegal markets, with the goal of searching for common features, which turn out to be somewhat elusive.
Protections intended to thwart organ trafficking may inadvertently also "protect" legitimate patients and donors from receiving life-saving medical care.
The Paradox of Protection: How Overregulation Threatens Living Kidney Donation in Mexico, by Francisco J. Reyna-Sepulveda and Javier Sanchez-Maldonado, Transplantation, Publish Ahead of Print, July 27, 2026. | DOI: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005860
"Globally, unrelated and nondirected living kidney donations have become important mechanisms for expanding transplant access.1 Structured programs in the United States and Spain support unrelated donation through rigorous psychological evaluation, independent donor advocacy, and transparent oversight systems.3,4 For example, nondirected donors serve as critical initiators of kidney paired donation chains, substantially amplifying transplant opportunities beyond a single donor-recipient pair.3-5 However, a recent regulatory shift in Mexico threatens to effectively preclude these pathways in practice, leaving living kidney donors (including living liver donors) with genuine altruistic intent declined and vulnerable patients losing critical access to life-saving transplants.
"WHEN ALTRUISM REQUIRES PROOF
"On August 4, 2023, the National Transplant Center and the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks issued a High Health Directive (Alta Directiva Sanitaria), establishing mandatory standardized protocols for Mexican transplant centers.6 This directive emerged in response to well-documented regional concerns regarding organ trafficking, transplant tourism, regulatory gaps, and the “legal simulation” of donor-recipient relationships. These concerns are entirely legitimate and align with the principles articulated by the Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism.7
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"Although the directive does not explicitly outlaw nondirected donation, its evidentiary requirements effectively preclude it at the committee level. As a result, viable donor candidates may be categorically declined for regulatory rather than medical reasons.
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"Although data isolating the exact proportion of donor evaluations declined solely for documentation rather than medical or psychosocial factors are currently unavailable, Mexican National Registry data highlight a concerning sign.9 During the 12 mo preceding the directive’s publication, 438 unrelated living donor kidney transplants were performed nationally, compared with 354 during the subsequent 12 mo—a 19% decline. "
...
"This directive severely limits Mexico’s potential to establish domestic paired-exchange networks or participate in cross-border paired kidney exchanges. The Global Kidney Exchange model, for instance, incorporates pairs from middle-income countries into US-initiated chains to overcome financial and immunological barriers.10 This approach has been accompanied by ethical discussion in the transplant literature, particularly regarding concerns about potential inducements and unintended exploitation.10"
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"Ultimately, the critical question is not whether expanding living kidney donation should be permitted, but whether a transplant system can be considered ethically complete if a viable living kidney donor candidate is categorically declined for regulatory rather than medical reasons."
"I was a little surprised to find out that Roth has a wide streak of provocation in his personality. It comes across in his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work, published in May. In a mild, just-asking-questions tone, Roth digs into one prohibited or controversial activity after another: buying sex, eating horses, selling organs, assisting suicide, carrying a stranger’s baby. He asks why many of these activities are prohibited or restricted even though some people clearly want them. And he thinks about whether it’s possible to design markets for them in a way that preserves people’s freedom to transact while protecting those who don’t want to.
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"Roth entertains so many ideas that others strenuously resist that I asked if he calls himself a libertarian. No, he said. “People who call themselves libertarians often don’t like market regulation of any sort,” he said. “But I’m a market designer. I think that good regulations help markets work well.” Cigarettes and alcohol, for example. They can be sold, but not to children. That’s a reasonable balance.
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"If you want to design markets that enable beneficial exchanges while protecting the vulnerable, you may have to persuade people that a market in some repugnant good or service is tolerable. Roth seems to have taken on that task in Moral Economics. He never told me what to think. He just asked me what I think, and to think about what I think. It’s an economist’s kind of mischief—relentlessly, cheerfully inquisitive about the rules we’ve decided to live by but have never quite explained to ourselves.
Kidney transactions don’t seem so repugnant to me anymore. Would I sell a kidney to a stranger? Um, maybe, some day. Would I buy a kidney from a stranger if I really needed one? Hell, yeah."
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