February 1, 2024

We Are Not Our Brains

In my book, The Brain Death Fallacy, I quote neurologist James Bernat: “How the brain generates conscious awareness remains the most intractable mystery of and the greatest remaining challenge to neuroscience. As of 2018, neuroscientists have m...

October 23, 2023

Doctors Change Brain Death Guidelines

On October 11, 2023, the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) and several other medical societies released a revised brain death diagnosis guideline for physicians.  The previous 2010 guideline was questioned because it did not comply with t...

August 26, 2023

Using People with 'Brain Death' as Lab Rats

Doctors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the NYU Langone Transplant Institute in New York City reported successfully implanting genetically modified pig kidneys into two "brain dead" men this month.  The New York pat...

April 22, 2023

Would I Receive a Transplant?

I was asked recently whether I would receive a transplant. I have often addressed this question in my lectures and videos on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. Like most questions, the answer to this question is, “It depends...

October 25, 2022

We Need an Ethical Definition of Death

While the definition of death is being fiercely debated in the medical literature, the public has been kept in the dark.  Or is the public being intentionally misled?  As bioethicist David Rodriguez-Arias writes, "[t]he histo...

October 2, 2022

Doctors have a macabre new way to harvest organs

In the never-ending quest for viable organs, doctors have found a way around brain death and circulatory death criteria.  Transplant centers around the country are removing organ donors from life support, clamping off the blood flow to thei...

September 8, 2022

Using people for spare parts, the quick and easy way

The diagnosis of brain death is coming under scrutiny in England after a "brain-dead" baby spontaneously began breathing on his own.  According to Sky News, the four-month-old baby had been declared brain-dead but continued on ven...