What and when is death

The President’s Council on Bioethics has taken up this question in a recently published report entitled Controversies in the Determination of Death. At stake in the report is the moral status of those human beings who are “suspended at the threshold.” These are human beings who have suffered the worst sort of injury to the brain, but who, with technological support, retain ambiguous signs of life. The brain injury leaves them in a state of incapacitation significantly more profound than that associated with the “persistent vegetative state,” the condition associated with the cases of Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, and Terri Schiavo. The name given to their injury is “brain death,” or sometimes “whole brain death.” The President’s Council suggests a more neutral term: “total brain failure.” Calling the condition by this name does not pre-judge the question of whether the patient so diagnosed is alive or dead. The New Atlantis