Medical Daily | A teenage girl who had been stuck in a coma after a catastrophic car crash miraculously woke up just as doctors were about to declare her brain dead and harvest her organs. Doctors had assessed Carina Melchior's chances of recovery as being very low and asked her family whether they would consider organ donation. Her parents agreed and the 19-year-old was taken off of her respirator.

Yahoo | The severe shortage of viable organs for transplantation in the U.S. has led a transplant surgeon to propose harvesting kidneys from people who are not dead yet. Dr. Paul Morrissey, an associate professor of surgery at Brown University's Alpert Medical School, wrote in The American Journal of Bioethics that the protocol known as donation after cardiac death -- meaning death as a result of irreversible damage to the cardiovascular system -- has increased the number of organs available for transplant, but has a number of limitations, including the need to wait until the heart stops.

Lifesite |  According to the Daily Mail newspaper, a young British man owes his life to an insistent father who would not allow his son’s organs to be removed from his body, despite assurances from four doctors that his son could not recover from the wounds he had suffered in a recent car accident.

 BBC | Are pigs about to migrate from the dinner table to the operating table? Using animals as a source of organs for transplantation into humans was once one of medicine's next big things - a solution to transplant waiting lists. However, there have been problems with rejection - and recently stem cells have been grabbing the spotlight. But some researchers are now saying that transplants from animals "could soon become a reality", but not necessarily as originally expected.