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It is being called the world’s longest kidney transplant chain, with 30 recipients across the United States. WLS reports.

We are grateful to The New York Times for this story, which took us inside a remarkable event, a kind of relay race of generosity. 90,000 people need kidney transplants tonight, 4,500 will die each year. But the man who founded the National Kidney Registry figured out that all of us would find it in …

A single good deed helped save the lives of 30 people. Two Chicago area residents are among 60 people who took part in the longest kidney transplant chain ever.

A donation by a Good Samaritan, Rick Ruzzamenti, set in motion a 60-person chain of transplants that ended with a kidney for Donald C. Terry Jr. Rick Ruzzamenti admits to being a tad impulsive. He traded his Catholicism for Buddhism in a revelatory flash. He married a Vietnamese woman he had only just met. And …

Joseph Vohs, an insurance agent with Farmers Insurance in Shawnee, will donate a kidney anonymously in Chicago at the end of the month. Vohs said he hopes the procedure can become more commonplace in the Kansas City area.

Edna Marie Medeiros chokes up talking about how Season of Sharing—The Chronicle’s annual giving campaign—helped her move to a larger apartment so her son Antonio could have his own room while recovering from a kidney transplant.

Melissa Arlio is an upbeat, healthy 26-year-old from a big Italian family in Wayne, NJ. With nothing to gain and a good deal to lose (namely, her job) Arlio elected to undergo surgery and donate one of her kidneys to a complete stranger last March. She did so in order to start an altruistic kidney …

They’re not related by blood, but the seven women who work at Loyola Hospital in Maywood have a special bond: They have each donated one of their kidneys to a stranger or acquaintance as part of Loyola’s Living Donor Kidney Transplant program’s “Pay it Forward” program.

Six months ago, dental hygienist Jodi Tamen sent one of her kidneys west from Chicago to a stranger in Los Angeles—a high-spirited, gray-bearded poet named G. Murray Thomas. Last week, Tamen flew out herself to celebrate with the man whose life her gift restored.

The work of the National Kidney Registry has galvanized 50 centers across the country, transplanting record numbers of kidney patients over the last three years. On Thursday, the momentum will continue with the largest kidney chain to date, a swap that is expected to save 28 lives at the Methodist San Antonio Transplant Center in …