Transplants are a great step forward in science's service of man, and not a few people today owe their lives to an organ transplant.

Increasingly, the technique of transplants has proven to be a valid means of attaining the primary goals of all medicine - the service of human life.

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It must first be emphasized, as I observed on another occasion, that every organ transplant has its source in a decision of great ethical value: the decision to offer without reward a part of one's own body for the health and well being of another person. Here precisely lies the nobility of the gesture, a gesture which is a genuine act of love.

This first point has an immediate consequence of great ethical import: the need for informed consent. The human authenticity of such a decisive gesture requires that individuals be properly informed about the processes involved, in order to be in a position to consent or declined in a free and conscientious manner.

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Acknowledgement of the unique dignity of the human person has a further underlying consequence: vital organs, which occur singly in the person, can only be removed after death that is from the body of someone who is certainly dead. … the criterion adopted in more recent times for ascertaining the fact of death, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem in conflict with the essential elements of sound anthropology.

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Another question of great ethical significance is that of the allocation of donated organs through waiting lists and assignment of priorities. ….. in determining who should have precedence in receiving an organ, judgments should be made on the basis of immunological and clinical factors.

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A final issue concerns a possible alternative solution to the problem of finding human organs for transplantation, … , namely xenotransplants, that is, organ transplants from other organ species…….For a xenotransplant to be licit, the transplanted organ must not impair the integrity of the psychological or genetic identity of the person receiving it; and there must also be a proven biological possibility that the transplant will be successful and will not expose the recipient to inordinate risk.

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In any event, methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view of obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction oh human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself.