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Thank you, Maria, for inviting me,

and thank you all for coming.

People hear about organ transplantation,

and a lot of times they don't know much about it,

especially about the ethics associated with it.

You might say this is going to sort of be the dark side of things, I guess,

because we usually think it's all very rosy, but as a matter of fact,

there are some concerns, and so we'll be looking at a lot of those.

I'll be talking what I call the slippery slope of organ transplantation.

Terminology and philosophy, meaning you're sliding down a slope from one mistake down to further

consequential mistakes down the road. And the idea here is that organ transplantation is

good thing because it saves lives, but the danger is we need lots of organs. There is an

increasing demand for organs, and when there's this high demand, the worry is, well, we might do questionable

things to get those organs. And so that's what we'll be looking at to a good extent. And the first

step in this kind of slippery slope is actually brain death. So the first organ transplantation was in 1954 with between identical

twins of the kidney. And subsequently there were some more, but the difficulty was, of course,

finding organs. And one of the difficulties is that ethics, at least in the 1960s, as these

...