Back in 2009, a Dartmouth neuroscientist named Craig Bennett was fed up with the increasingly
strong dogma surrounding studies of the human experience that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The public had grown to accept headlines that described the findings of recent studies: Men literally see women as objects, we're all actually racist and humans are hardwired for religion, altruism or monogamy. The studies themselves were increasingly designed to cultivate such headlines.
Bennett satirized these soft studies by putting a 3.5-pound salmon, a dead one, in an MRI machine and showing it pictures of humans with an array of facial expressions. With each, Bennett asked the dead fish what emotion it thought the photo showed. Bennett had a surprise in store. Functional scans found slight electrical activity in the fish's brain, which further demonstrated his point. "If I were a ridiculous researcher, I'd say, 'A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state,'" he told Wired magazine.
His study (though mostly unnoticed) also underscored a larger issue facing the world right now. We have at our disposal technology that can detect the most profoundly minute signals of life. And yet, we have not yet reached the point where we can bring those signals back to any kind of meaningful level of consciousness once they've disappeared. We are still, in the second decade of the 21st century, unable to revive dead things, human, salmon or otherwise.
Perhaps most hauntingly, these machines challenge our definition of death. We've reached this weird point in human history where we've created technology that has leapfrogged over our traditional methods of distinguishing life, like looking for signs of respiration and feeling for a pulse. We cannot be sure whether those signals are life and are helpless to do anything but observe them. But we can sustain them, and it is in this ability that we reach our current conundrum: We have no idea when death occurs.
This problem is a contemporary one. In centuries past, the problem of defining death was insignificant, aside from the fear of being buried alive, which still loomed large on the minds of those approaching death. George Washington instructed his body be laid out for two days before being entombed, just in case. Frederic Chopin asked to be fully cut open prior to being buried. Safety coffins, a subcategory of caskets appeared in the 17th to 19th centuries. These caskets were generally outfitted with a bell attached to a string hanging down to the deceased's hand or some other means of alerting the living topside that a premature burial had indeed taken place.
Death was death, and there was no real need to define when it took place.
Then two advances -- organ transplantation and life-sustaining technology -- converged in the middle of the 20th century to give us urgent reasons to come up with an acceptable definition of death. We could now artificially maintain the mechanisms of life -- respiration and heartbeat -- in a person whose brain no longer functioned, ostensibly until the person died of old age. But what purpose does it serve to maintain the life of a terminally unconscious patient, especially after it became possible to transfer that person's organs into another person who could put them to good use?
Since science is incapable of quantifying when death occurs, it turned to society for guidance. The 1970s saw a spate of piecemeal legislation, as states created their own definitions of death. Those that did emphasized brain death. In 1981, a council of medical ethicists convened by Jimmy Carter supported this idea of brain-centered death, and the remaining states followed suit.
There is yet no federal definition of death, and there are actually a couple of ways that death can legally take place today. Cardiopulmonary death -- the cessation of a spontaneous heartbeat -- remains an accepted definition of death, but quantifying the moment of death still remains elusive. In 1997, an Institutes of Medicine panel decided that five minutes after the cessation of heartbeat was the moment of death. This choice was arbitrary and sentimental, however. Worse, during this time, the heart is starved of oxygen, and what was a viable transplant organ five minutes earlier becomes useless.
The other organ of life, the brain, has also proved prickly as a means of determining death. The focus for brain death has long been the brain stem, which controls the most basic functions like breathing. Medical science established rigorous criteria for brain stem death. Patients who are subjected to these tests have ice water squirted into their ears, have a tube introduced in their esophagus to induce gagging and are twice taken off ventilators to determine apnea, among other tests.
The problem is, again, some people who are apparently dead can still show the most primitive signs of life. We arrived at the most recent incarnation of the question of death, something like: If your lungs are moving, does that really mean you're still alive?
Last year, the President's Council on Bioethics answered no. Death is now the end of engagement with the world around us. If widely adopted, this idea would end the ventilator debate. A human engaged in the act of breathing does so for survival, a human whose lungs rise and fall does so because of the pressure exerted by a machine. He is no longer engaged in the act of survival and is therefore dead.
This is a momentous move; the heritage of our collective fear of being buried alive has prompted us for decades to err on the side of caution, to prevent even the slightest possibility that those physicians who harvest organs are actually taking them from living people. This newest concept of brain death signals that we have reached the point where we are opting to no longer believe our eyes, but to put our faith instead in the idea that death is something we are not yet able to detect.
Judith Johnson: Why We Need to Talk About Death and Dying
Joseph Nowinski, Ph.D.: The New Grief: How Modern Medicine Is Changing Dying, Death and Loss
Jeanne Dennis: Destigmatizing Death and Dying Through Social Media
Julie Gray: The Weight of My Brother's Ashes: Further Trials in Grieving
Death - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife
Death definition - Medical Dictionary definitions of popular ...
Death | Define Death at Dictionary.com
Oh wait, they already have ...
— Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.
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Works for sex. Works for death.
Many, many years ago I chose to abort a fetus with anencephaly: a mass of cells that looks like a baby but lacks a brain. I generally don't talk about it because everyonce in awhile I'll get the nosy do-gooder telling me that I should have carried to term and given a proper burial to IT. Not their business one way or another. Do not resuscitate orders are frequently ignored as hospitals do not want the liability "just in case" - so even as we try to plan ahead and maintain our dignity or not have our families be burdened with astronomical bills to give artificial life to the already deceased.
Seems like the brain-life thingy is a murky issue with no small amount of opportunity for someone to milk the debate for personal gain (political power, a "moral" pulpit, etc)
But beyond that particular definition, designed for precision to allow transplantation, death has seemed to me to be quite easy to determine. It is the point at which the observations we all agree are life, ... meaningful signs of life and its constantly interactive aspects, ... reach a point where they grow so faint as to be unobservable. The dead salmon in the MRI is an example, ... bombard previous living tissue with radio waves in magnetic fields such as those in MRI's, and a slab of beef might twitch, ... but it is not living.
And so we agree, and disagree, in order to draw a legal line in time. What came before it was life, and in its absence death.
Next question: Will Dr. McCoy be able to return Spock's brain to his original body before he loses the knowledge to perform the transplant operation?
Follow up: Brain? Brain! What is brain?!?!
One family member asked me if he should stop visiting his severely demented mother who no longer recognized him. I asked him how she responded when he visited her and his reply was telling: "She doesn't have any idea who I am but she seems to perk up when she sees me, happy to have a visitor." He had his answer. As long as dilettantes like Ms. Palin voice their idiotic concerns about "death panels" there will be no progress. We need to continue the conversation and learn to be comfortable with uncertainty, recognizing the most common color here is grey, not black or white.
Then the Tea Party is dead!
We need to rationally discuss these issues and come to some kind of agreement as a society. It is too heavy a burden to leave for doctors and individual family members to make on their own.
http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/
Same debate rages at the other end of the spectrum. Some think life begins when a sperm hits an egg, others want further development. Either way, we have people that want to enforce their moral view of life and death.
Too bad we give our pets more options than humans.
these people are nuts....they fight science and logic all the way......UNTIL IT SUITS THEM
The revival of especially children who have drowned especially after a fall into icy water shows that complete revival after what looked for all the world like death is quite possible, and doesn't require anything very high-tech to achieve. The custom of holding wakes and sitting with the dead body overnight and for a few days is a folk custom that also shows that people have long known that the line between life, which involves constant regeneration of tissues, and death, which is a one-way arrow pointing down, has never been clear and simple.
The only thing that has changed is the ability and desire to "harvest" one person's organs and implant them in another person. This is supposed to be a warm fuzzy wonderful thing, but it is actually a form of cannibalism. I think that before we go too far in re-defining death, we might want to think a little more carefully about the morality of organ transplantation.