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Cato Dispatch for November 20, 2007

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Dutch May Compensate Kidney Donors

"The Dutch health minister, Ab Klink, is considering a recommendation to offer free health insurance for life to anyone who donates a kidney for transplant," reports The London Times. "The initiative has been prompted by a chronic shortage of organ donors in the Netherlands. With an average waiting list of four years, one of the longest in Europe, about 200 Dutch people die each year while waiting for a new kidney."

In the Cato Policy Analysis "A Gift of Life Deserves Compensation: How to Increase Living Kidney Donation with Realistic Incentives," Dr. Arthur Matas writes: "The best way to increase the supply of kidneys without drastically changing the existing allocation system is to legalize a regulated system of compensation for living kidney donors. Such a system could be established using the infrastructure already in place for evaluating deceased donors and allocating their organs. The only change required to ease and probably even solve the organ shortage is some form of payment for donors.

"The potential practical and theoretical concerns with compensated donation can be overcome, and alternative proposals will not do enough to solve the shortage. Upon careful analysis, it is clear that the benefits of a regulated system of compensated donation (chiefly, increasing the number of donated kidneys) outweigh any risks."

Katrina Rated Largest Ecodisaster

"From vast slash pine plantations to river-bottom hardwood stands, Hurricane Katrina killed or damaged about 320 million trees across Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas -- the largest ecological disaster in US history, new estimates reveal," reports The Christian Science Monitor. "Confronting a potential 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gases seeping from rotting logs and leaves, the proliferation of nonnative plants, and a spike in wildfire risks, scientists and residents alike are raising new questions about the storm's environmental legacy."

In a statement issued today, Cato senior fellow Patrick Michaels comments: "The Christian Science Monitor reported today that Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, was the 'largest ecological disaster' in U.S. history because it destroyed 320 million trees. In fact, hurricanes are a fact of life that forests of the southeastern North America have lived with -- well -- ever since there was forest. It is true that hurricanes uproot trees. They have been doing this for at least 50 million years, or at least as long as large flowering plants (known as trees) evolved into their current genera.

"Nor are the forests of southeastern North America 'natural,' compared to the vegetation before the European colonization radiated through the region. Before then, huge fires, as well as hurricanes, would occasionally sweep through the region, and the mix of species and the architecture of the forest was much different than it is now. It is worth remembering that for at least 95% of the last 100 million years, earth's surface temperature was higher than it is now. If Katrina was a product of global warming, it was, in fact, a hurricane typical of what ancient forests experienced on a regular basis."

New Stem Cell Method Found

"Two teams of scientists are reporting today that they turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo -- a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field," reports The New York Times. "All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone."

In "No Tax Money for Stem Cells," Sigrid Fry-Revere, Cato's director of bioethics studies, writes: "Stem cells hold more promise than any breakthrough since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. But governments should not make promises that they cannot keep due to political opposition and their own inefficiency. The false hope that the government is taking care of stem cell research will only inhibit private donors and investors from stepping up to the plate.

"We should legalize stem cell research in all its forms, protecting universities and private organizations from the uncertainties of political whims -- and leave it at that."

Jacob Grier, editor, jgrier@cato.org