New Harvest: Transplanting Body Parts and Reaping the Benefits (Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society)

Since the beginning of its modern incarnation, transplantation has been an ethical timebomb. Questions have been raised about the rights of both recipient and donor, as well as the social, religious, and ethical propriety of transplantation itself.

Not merely a collection of essays, New Harvest presents a dialog on the topic by members of the medical, legal, religious, and philosophical fields, all revolving around several basic issues: What are the limits of biomedical principles? • Which ethical models should guide legislation?• Brain death and the status of fetuses • New concepts of human self-identity• Brain tissue grafting, the interchangeability • Reproductive and neurological transplantation of body parts, and genetic engineering • Religious, psychiatric, legal and philosophical considerations.

Insightful chapters, including one on the concept of "self-identity," bring the religious, legal, historical, and more recent topics, such as brain tissue grafting and fetal transplants, into a unified structure. A book for the concerned layperson as well as the specialist, New Harvest is an enlightening summation of a concern that is at the forefront of biomedical ethics today.