Severance, a popular Emmy Award-winning show streaming on Apple TV+, is a rich cultural artifact. It concerns a team of office workers at a morally questionable company that performs brain surgery on employees to sever the consciousness of their work and personal lives. The four of us were so taken by the show that we wrote these reflections on its important ethical themes.

We believe that the concept of brain death, though flawed in its present application, can be preserved and promoted as a pathway to organ donation, but only after particular changes are made in the medical criteria for its diagnosis.

A remarkable experiment raises anew questions about whether brain-death is really death.

To address recent lawsuits that question whether the persistent of hormonal functions is consistent with death by neurologic criteria (such as the case of Jahi McMath), we proposed specific mention in a UDDA that loss of hormonal functions is not required for declaration of death by neurologic criteria.

Perhaps we were naïve. Our plan was relatively simple: we would chart the legislative evolution of programs for veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) to identify policy gaps for this...

Two cases involving “brain death” have received considerable public attention, including commentary by several well-known bioethicists. In commenting on these cases the bioethicists have stated, in no uncertain terms, that...

Brain death is an immensely challenging concept to grasp, even for health care providers. The patients look like any other patient in the intensive care unit; they have vital signs,...

It may be more than just discrimination at work. As is to be expected, once people start reflecting on an essay as important and provocative as Bill Peace’s“Comfort Care as...

A powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Report describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author, William J. Peace, who has been paralyzed from...

Patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state have figured prominently in the law and medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions since the case of Karen Quinlan in 1976....