Staff writer Brain death: It's a phrase we hear every day. In Japan, the public has been exposed to it to the point of numbness through nationwide campaigns for more organ donors. "Brain death is human death, and organ donation saves lives," we are exhorted. In the United States, the world's leading transplant center, organs are transplanted from 5,000 brain-dead patients a year. The issue of what constitutes brain death is yesterday's controversy, isn't it?
Arthur Caplan, a leading U.S. bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks so. "It has been settled," he says. "There is absolute consensus in the U.S."
Yet it is increasingly apparent that there isn't. Robert Truog, head of intensive care at Children's Hospital in Boston, Mass., is just one of several medical professionals in the U.S. who argue that the neurological definition of death -- so-called brain death -- should be abandoned because it is theoretically incoherent.