Total brain failure: a new contribution by the President's Council on Bioethics to the definition of death according to the neurological standard.

摘要

"Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death." With these words, in 1967 the Harvard's Committee started one of the most influential papers ever published in the medical literature [1]. In it, the Committee did not produce any scientific reason to justify why brain-dead patients are dead, but used moral and social justifications to demonstrate why they should be regarded as dead.