Ethical and philosophical arguments against the sale of organs for transplantation are difficult to sustain when scrutinised closely, says a University of Toronto professor of public health and surgery in an article entitled “The case for a regulated system of living kidney sales” (Nature Clinical Practice Nephrology 2006;2:600-1).

Abdallah Daar, director of ethics and policy for the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine and co-director of the Canadian Program on Genomics and Global Health, says he and colleagues in the International Forum for Transplant Ethics do not argue that organ sales are always acceptable or that …