Can Tuğrul
FOR the Egyptians, death was simple. You stopped breathing and your friends and family bid you farewell. Then they poked a hook up your nose and scraped out your brain, safe in the knowledge that they would see you again in the afterlife.
These days, figuring out the difference between life and death has got more problematic. For starters, there is no globally agreed definition of death, which means you can be pronounced dead in one country yet wouldn’t be in another. Then there is the recent discovery that death doesn’t happen in an instant, but over weeks. Add to that the inevitable storm generated by experiments revealing that brains can be resuscitated hours after death. No wonder scientists, philosophers and even the Vatican are asking how we should decide when dead really is dead.
Until the mid-20th century, our definition of death was unambiguous: you were dead when you stopped breathing and had no pulse. Things got complicated with the invention of the ventilator, a machine that could maintain breathing for a person who would otherwise be declared dead. At about this time, doctors began transplanting organs from the dead into the living and found that they could increase the success rate by using a ventilator to provide the donor heart with oxygen. These “beating-heart cadavers” were legally alive even though their brains had ceased to function.
The resulting quandary of how to remove an organ without committing murder eventually led to the 1980s Uniform Determination of Death Act in the US, which introduced the concept…
