Organ transplantation progresses so rapidly that it provides a paradigm for ethics and problems of justice in the whole field of modern medicine. ‘Organ transplantation: ethical, legal and psychosocial aspects’ illustrates this statement as it shows how the introduction of new techniques and the extension of medical applications beg for new app- roaches. This book presents the proceedings of a European commission-sponsored congress held in Rotterdam in April 2007. The organizers’ intent is not to formulate guidelines dealing with known problems but rather to identify new controversies and dilemmas faced by transplantation and to propose a platform for a further European consensus conference on their ethical, legal and psychosocial aspects. Three state-of-the-art lectures introduce the views of Europe, the United States and the developing countries. Free communications (6–15) are subsequently grouped in six workshops, each of which concludes on recommendations supported sometimes by interesting summaries: the way is thus paved for further discussions and possible guidelines. The first workshop on ‘commercialization and trafficking’ not only reiterates previously accepted recommendations on organ commerce but also digs deeper into the problem of compensation and its rationale in developing countries. The second workshop on ‘legal systems for organ donation and allocation’ raises challenging questions on who owns the body, on the differences between the spheres of living and deceased donation, on the rules of reciprocal donation or, eventually, on the impact of existing systems for renal allocation of deceased donors. The third workshop on ‘altruism, counselling and psychological aspects of living donation’ emphasizes the necessity to clarify, reformulate and unify the psychological approach of donation, to assist patients in the search for living donors and to gather information on the follow-up of living donors, perhaps through a registry of difficult cases. The fourth workshop on ‘minorities, religion and gender’ points to the implicated need for sociologists, religious stakeholders and theologians to assess the impact of ethnicity, social class, gender and religion on organ donation. The fifth workshop on ‘expanded criteria for deceased donors’ highlights the steps to be taken to prevent the use of non-heart beating donors lowering the number of heart beating donors. The distinction between the two types of donors should thus not be overemphasized. The last workshop on the ‘role of patients, media and industry’ concludes on the need to develop European ethical guidelines in new domains such as partial face transplantation, to promote Europe-backed public–private partnerships for the development of new drugs and, finally, to stimulate research on the impact of media on the public opinion on organ donation. Despite its mainly Dutch inspiration, illustrated by the number of experts and contributors, this congress retains an international flavour resting on the participation of 17 countries. Although the novelty of each workshop's approach is unequal, many challenging new ethical and legal issues are clearly identified and will, hopefully, provide a European platform for further progresses. These proceedings will therefore be of interest to all those who have chosen to study in more detail the ethical, legal and psychosocial aspects of (mainly renal) organ transplantation.