They're all heart

The crowd at the Transparent Transplants conference, held at London's Science Museum last week, was impressed by the British Heart Foundation's altruism - but only briefly. Michael Wilks, chairman of the British Medical Association medical ethics committee, said the BHF had written to support the idea of more organ donations from living donors. He added: "Then, next day, we got another letter saying that although they supported the idea, they did not support it for heart transplants."

Meanwhile, Dundee University's law department hosted a talk on animal rights and the boundaries of transplants between animals and humans.

The guest speaker on "Reconfiguring the animal/human boundary: the case of xenotransplantation" was Marie Fox.