

Redefining Death to Save Organ Donations - sorbus
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/braindeath/

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bugs
In regards to the ethics of organ donations: I have known quite a few people
who purposefully deny the organ donor stamp on their drivers licenses out of
worry that because someone else may benefit (moneywise) their life may not be
saved and their organs would be harvested.

This is a very sad state regarding saving lives when people worry about
corruption in health services such as emergency medical care.

Even more so redefining death in philosophical terms brings to my mind some
weird workings behind this as in a science based field such things should not
weigh so highly.

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cpr
I'm sorry, but this article can't hide the hard reality that medical ethicists
are "moving the goalposts" in order to harvest more organs. This is a deadly
game.

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lmkg
I remember reading a few years ago that China had a lot of difficulty
obtaining organ donations because they still used the outdated notion of
heart-death, rather than brain-death, to determine legal death. As a result of
that (and other factors), around 90% of the organ donations in the PRC came
from executed criminals. Organ transplants are cheaper in the PRC, so they
were one of the larger destinations for so-called "organ transplant tourism."
I don't know if they've updated their definition of death or not (hard to find
recent info), but the issue with executed criminals is still apparently an
outstanding international concern.

This article, and this issue, is another example of how science continues to
challenge our deep-held assumptions and viewpoints, by making edge cases
increasingly relevant. In this case, life-or-death important, not just for the
organ donor, but for the recipient as well. It's a hard decision to have to
throw a loved one (or their ventilated but oh-so-lively-looking cadaver,
depending on your point of view) under the bus based on statistical
likelyhoods of greater good.

