A new plan from Facebook encourages everyone on the social network to advertise their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools. Could the plan be a slippery slope linking medical information and social media? Jeff Jarvis is professor of journalism at City University of New York. Art Caplan is a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Amit Gupta first appeared on The Takeaway in October, three weeks after being diagnosed with leukemia, to discuss his experiences trying to find a bone marrow donor. Amit is of South Indian descent, and South Indians are severely under-represented in the donor pool. His friend Seth Godin, who writes for the popular blog SethGodin.com, offered $10,000 to the first person to be a donor match with Amit.

Blogger Seth Godin wanted to help his friend and colleague Amit Gupta, who has leukemia, so he offered up a challenge to his readers: the first bone marrow donor match to Gupta who would donate stem cells would receive $10,000. But under the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, better known as NOTA, it’s a federal crime to give or receive "valuable consideration" for any transplantable organ or tissue, specifically including bone marrow. And beyond the legal aspects, some people may find Godin's gesture ethically questionable.

The New York state health department released a report this week saying that an organ transplant recipient contracted HIV from a kidney donation at a New York hospital. It’s the nation’s first documented case of HIV transmission via a living donor transplant since the 1980s. How did this happen? And what are the repercussions? 

At 57 years old, computer consultant Harry Kiernan is one of the few living people to have donated multiple organs. So far he’s donated one kidney, part of his liver, and is currently waiting to become a bone marrow donor. What’s more, Harry has given each of his organs to complete strangers. Harry tells us how being with his wife Denise as she died of chronic progressive multiple sclerosis 12 years ago motivated him to give all that he could to improve the lives anyone he could: even people he didn't know.

Listen to this morning's segment on organ donation here.

My college roommate died sadly and horribly in the fall of 2004. He had done something heroic and to my mind incomprehensible earlier that year when he donated a kidney to his sick nephew. My old friend Bob was in perfect health, in the prime of life. He loved to race cars, and was a Porsche fanatic. In school he had a Lancia Scorpion two-seater and an old BMW 2002. He was a world class car nut and his sense of risk was born out of taking 25 mile an hour street curves at 70 mph without hitting the brakes. He knew how to do a drift U turn without breaking a sweat. He was a brilliant physicist and could explain his driving excesses in calm momentum equations. Bob knew what was safe and what was not. So when he donated his kidney I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.

All this week we’re talking with our friends from Scientific American about endings: in nature, culture and science. For most of human history the clearest, most black and white ending in our lives was death. However, in recent decades, life support technology has made death a gray area, leading to right-to-life debates, as in the case of Terri Schiavo. But the question of when someone is dead becomes especially important when dealing with the process of organ donation.

We asked you, our listeners: If you are are an organ donor, what made you agree to it? If not, what's your reason against it? Let us know in the comments or call 877-8-MY-TAKE and we'll play the responses on the air.

Israel will soon become the first country to move people with organ donor cards up the list if they ever need a transplant themselves. Advocates of the new program say it's a win-win plan that will boost Israel's rate of donor sign-ups higher than its current 10 percent, while critics argue that the program violates the ideal of care being provided solely based on need.

Priority will still be given to patients immediately in need of heart, lung, and liver transplants, but when two people need the same organ, this priority scheme will have an impact. We’re joined from Tel Aviv by a leading supporter of the reform, Professor Jacob Lavee, whose article in the medical journal "The Lancet” outlined the new Israeli proposals on organ donation.  We also speak with Dr. Sally Satel, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington.