Will Live Organ Donations No Longer Be Justified?

Organ donations should not be restricted to relatives.

Should we remove whole organs from living donors only in the case where they are genetically related to the intended recipients of such organs? The practice in a majority of European nations is to apply such a restriction. Yet this restriction obviously limits the availability of already scarce donor organs, and curtails the opportunities for altruistic action on the part of those who, in any g...

Small proteins can no longer be ignored.

Small proteins, here defined as proteins of 50 amino acids or fewer in the absence of processing, have traditionally been overlooked due to challenges in their annotation and biochemical detection. In the past several years, however, increasing numbers of small proteins have been identified either through the realization that mutations in intergenic regions are actually within unannotated small...

This number will be updated

Introducing incentives in the market for live and cadaveric organ donations.

O rgan transplants began in 1954 with a kidney transplant performed at Brigham & Women’s hospital in Boston. But such procedures only began to take off with the development in the 1970s of immunosuppressive drugs that could prevent the rejection of transplanted organs. Since then, the number of kidney, liver, heart, and other organ transplants has grown rapidly, but not nearly as rapidly as the...

Underreported, underacknowledged: child abuse can no longer be ignored.

Child abuse is a serious problem in Hong Kong, and the recent Tin Shui Wai tragedy and assault of a 7-year-old boy have caused considerable public concern. Over the past 5 years, the number of new child abuse cases reported to the Child Protection Registry (CPR) by the Social Welfare Department has been increasing, and has recently risen by more than 50% from 622 cases in 2004 to 406 cases in j...