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.

In recent years, court cases and scholarly articles have increasingly highlighted discrepancies between the legal definition of death in the United States and the medical diagnostic standards for determining brain death. It has become clear to many that the 40-year-old Uniform Determination of Death Act, the legal standard, should be updated.

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.

It has been 50 years since the medical profession adopted the determination of death according to neurological criteria, known as “brain death.”  This doctrine was codified in 1981 in the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which declares,  “An individual who has sustained eit...

Twice upon a time, there was a girl who died. The death certificate that New Jersey issued to 17-year-old Jahi McMath on June 22 was the second one issued for her. California issued McMath’s first death certificate in December 2013.  McMath had been admitted to Children’s Hospital Oakland on...

“It was like he thought we were dirt.”