[greenmountin]

My favorite blogger that touches on these issues is Al Roth (http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com), a professor now at Stanford.

One of the coolest ideas there is the "organ donation chain." Think of one patient's spouse donating their kidney to another patient, and vice versa; now add an intermediary couple, and you've got a chain where more kidneys reach better compatible hosts. Unfortunately, because someone could always get cold feet, a lot of these chains had been carried out simultaneously, which naturally limits the size of such a chain.

So the cherry on top is a "non-directed" starter kidney. With this initial gift of altruism there's a little more leeway to arrange the matches and it's a disappointment but not a showstopper when someone finally stops the chain.

Anyways, it's always nice to think about the stopgaps between now and the sci-fi organ-growing future.