Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. After fourteen years, the three main issues that Robert Veatch first outlined in his seminal study Transplantation Ethics still remain: deciding when human beings are dead; deciding when it is ethical to procure organs; and deciding how to allocate organs, once procured.

However, much has changed. Enormous strides have been made in immunosuppression. Alternatives to the donation model are debated much more openly—living donors are used more widely and hand and face transplants have become more common, raising issues of personal identity. In this second edition of Transplantation Ethics, coauthored by Lainie F. Ross, transplant professionals and advocates will find a comprehensive update of this critical work on transplantation policies.

Robert M. Veatch is Professor of Medical Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Washington Regional Transplant Community as well as the Ethics Committee and the Vascular Composite Allografts Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, the Henry Knowles Beecher Award from the Hastings Center, and gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of fifty books including The Basics of Bioethics and Case Studies in Biomedical Ethics. Lainie F. Ross is the Carolyn & Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago; professor in the departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and the College; associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics; and codirector of the Institute for Translational Medicine. She is a recipient of the Patricia Price Brown Prize in Biomedical Ethics from the Oklahoma Health Sciences University and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is the author of two books, Children, Families and Health Care Decision-Making and Children in Medical Research: Access versus Protection.