The Nincds Collaborative Study Of Brain Death

Although some decades have passed, there are still worldwide controversies about a concept of human death on neurological grounds. There are also disagreements on the diagnostic criteria for brain death, whether clinical alone or clinical plus ancillary tests. Moreover, some scholars who were strong defenders of a brain-based standard of death are now favoring a circulatory-respiratory standard. The study of coma is extremely important because lesions of the brain are responsible for quality of life in patients or cause of death. The main goal of Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness is to provide a suitable scientific platform to discuss all topics related to human death and coma.

Since its inception in 1968, the brain-death criterion for human death has enjoyed the status of one of the few relatively well-settled issues in bioethics. However, over the last fifteen years or so, a growing number of experts in medicine, philosophy, and religion have come to regard brain death as an untenable criterion for the determination of death. Given that the debate about brain death has occupied a relatively small group of professionals, few are aware that brain death fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical conception of death. This is significant, for if the brain-dead are not dead, then the removal of their vital organs for transplantation is the direct cause of their deaths, and a violation of the Dead Donor Rule. This unique monograph synthesizes the social, legal, medical, religious, and philosophical problems inherent in current social policy allowing for organ donation under the brain-death criterion. In so doing, this bioethical appraisal offers a provocative investigation of the ethical quandaries inherent in the way transplantable organs are currently procured. Drawing together these multidisciplinary threads, this book advocates the abandonment of the brain-death criterion in light of its adverse failures, and concludes by laying the groundwork for a new policy of death in an effort to further the good of organ donation and transplantation.