As a global society we should ban organ trafficking and organ selling worldwide and act against this phenomenon. At the same time, we should continue our efforts to optimize our regional and national organ transplantation programs, increase public awareness of organ donation, encourage public opinion and religious leaders towards acceptance, and educate our medical community, to reach a goal where the majority of eligible patients consent to organ donation. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the National Transplantation Center, Dr Jonathan Cohen, and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Dr Tamar Ashkenazi for providing the recent data reported in this paper. Footnotes Conflict of interest: No potential

conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.
As part of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, a prominent

Orthodox Jewish physician and ethicist has published in RMMJ a comparative analysis between what he calls “the scientific aspects of the theory of evolution and a Judaic approach to these aspects”.1 But Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical rather Steinberg presents a creationist fundamentalist view masquerading as rational and “reasonable debate … in a calm and humble way”. In his essay, Steinberg digresses into discussing some issues concerning the science–religion debate that are clearly irrelevant to evolutionary theory. His arguments are partly misleading and mostly incorrect. One is tempted to let it go and pass indulgently and in silence over this entanglement into whitewashing apologetics. But Maimonides Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in his Guide of the Perplexed2 holds the opinion that it is better to bring no proof at all in favor of the Torah than to bring a poor proof, because a poor proof brings the whole system under suspicion; no proof does not. So as a Jew deeply committed to Halakhic Judaism and as practicing geneticist, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical I cannot refrain from offering some reflections in order to rectify the false picture presented on both subjects, Darwinian evolution and the Jewish perspective. SCIENCE AND DARWINIAN EVOLUTION Steinberg states that “Judaism accepts all experimentally proven facts and observations Dacomitinib of the theory

of evolution … but rejects other assumptions and speculations which contradict fundamental Jewish beliefs, and which are anyway not scientifically proven”. He presents a widely, but incorrectly, believed click here perception that the basis of all scientific knowledge is facts, which are obtained by experiments and observations. Accordingly, science begins with facts – observations about nature that can be verified by other scientists. Only after an agreed-upon body of facts exists can one begin to formulate theoretical concepts that might explain them.1 However, this view is wrong: science does not begin with facts; rather, all experimentation begins with the premise “Let us assume that…”. In short, science starts with theories and concepts about the physical world.