I'll donate blood all day long—I've donated gallons so I think I've earned a few pints should I ever need a transfusion. And I've been a cadaver organ donor ever since I got my driver's license, so that should entitle me to a slot on a cadaver organ waiting list. But for something as radical as a kidney, I can't see donating that to someone other than spouses or children. Maybe surgery is better than it used to be, but you're still losing a kidney, which reduced your renal function by half instantly and greatly increases your chance of having end-stage renal disease yourself down the road, not to mention other complications. It may not be likely, but there's a chance donating could kill you and it certainly measurably reduces life expectancy, and more importantly, expected QUALITY of life.

It's perfectly understandable that Frances sees this issue the way she does as an organ recipient, but there is a very good reason Congress and the medical establishment is extremely leery of living donor incentives and suspicious of unacquainted living donors. 6,000 internationally trafficked kidneys is a horrifying statistic. That's 6,000 individuals butchered for cash—something that libertarians may see as a matter of individual liberty but is in fact the opposite; desperate individuals reduced to literally selling their own flesh and health to wealthy citizens of other nations.

As long as humans (and other mammals) have had kidneys, they have died of kidney diseases. It is wonderful that medicine has saved and extended millions of these lives through dialysis and cadaver transplant. But anything but 100% altruistic living transplant opens the door to brave new world where there is a tradable marketplace for health and quality of life, where every tissue in your body has a price tag, and where the expectation that you are entitled to all the functioning organs in your body until they fail of their own accord is no longer the case. It is no stretch of the imagination to the Wall Street Shylocks of the future trading options, futures, and other derivatives on organs, where kidneys and livers can be pawned or mortgaged—and are, more often than not.

Point taken as to outcomes, I assume you're referring to "Long-Term Consequences of Kidney Donation." NEJM 360:459-469.

Natural orifice donation with women is even more promising, and my comment about reduced kidney function was pretty much wrong. (Capacity is reduced by 50% but function is normally not, they aren't the same things as I implied.)

A three-day hospital stay and the chance of greater complications (or death) is still nothing to sniff at, and there are great risks to trivializing the ethical considerations. Default-donation is a much better avenue for reform than the dangerous path of incentivizing living-donor donation. The existing trafficking of human organs (mostly in nations where advanced laparoscopic techniques are less available) and in human organs even in America through illicit rings of funeral directors and organ companies (as happened for example in Staten Island a year or so ago) shows how far people are willing to go where health and money is involved even under the existing regulatory regime.

Guess what? The AP is writing for a popular audience, not a technical one. Their definition may have not have been correct enough for you, but is was not particularly lazy and certainly not cartoonish.

As Felix pointed out, you yourself put quotes around the word "pitch," so it is laughable that you put so much effort pettily snarling at the AP for putting quotes around "wind shear" for the exact same reason—they are defining the word. Guess what, if there is a "dangerous loss of airspeed and lift," the plane is smashed to the ground, due to a very real force familiar to both physicists and pilots as "gravity."

It is incredibly boring to read entire articles devoted to this kind of petty and wrongheaded nitpicking, especially when you yourself are equally guilty (quoting "pitch," which is fine except you lambast the AP for doing so, and abusing the word "virulent.")

I don't care if you make little mistakes like that, but please, especially after an incident like a plane crash, find something interesting related to aviation to write about other than your obsessive terminology and punctuation quibbles with the press—which might be considered "lazy" journalism.

I don't think there's any harm in prioritizing organ donations to donors, that's fair play and probably nobody is going donate an organ for that purpose. According to kidneydoc that's already the practice.

But that's a far cry from providing compensation that is essentially exchangeable for money.

And although I exaggerated the risks of donation (and I don't think I can be faulted as a layperson for not know of a groundbreaking study just published at the end of January), there is still a fundamental difference in the nature of organ donation versus other altruistic acts, including blood donation. You are donating a vital organ from your body and are never whole again, even if the outcomes are decent, and even if the benefit to the recipient is greater than that harm.

If you crack open the door to a marketplace for body parts, there are thousands of eager players with no moral compunctions who will see only billions of dollars to be made in any gap in regulation, and millions (billions?) of bodies of poor and desperate people out there with skin, marrow, kidneys, and liver lobes to offer. These players will find a way to match people with economic need and no altruistic intent willing to donate for compensation, and once that toothpaste is out of the tube, it's a just a jump to where the poor become a living organ bank for the rich.