We posted an item about stem cells living long after the body they inhabit is declared dead. This kind of discovery makes you wonder what “dead” really means. IO9 posted an interview with Dick Teresi, author of the book
The
Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers —
How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death, who says medical doctors and scientists don’t see death in the same way, and there are differences even among those groups.
Some patients are declared brain dead and then begin
spontaneously breathing hours later. Medical scientists say it doesn’t
matter because most brain-dead patients do not come back to life, but a
rigorous scientist would say that these cases speak loudly about the
flaws in our criteria for death. And yes — death to a cardiologist means
that your heart has stopped, and he can’t get it to restart. But to a
neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at
Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a
second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still
pumping, and you’re still able to breathe on a ventilator, if your brain
stem is down, you’re dead. This theory was made law in all 50 states in
1981, so now in the U.S. we have two kinds of death: real death
(cardiopulmonary death) and what some doctors call “pretty dead,” or
brain death. A cell biologist, on the other hand, may have a standard
more rigorous than cardiologists or neurologists. They might want to see
all one’s cells dead, which we call putrefaction.
He goes on to talk about how our complex criteria for death has evolved over history, and where it may be tomorrow.
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