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...

Defining Death: Organ Transplantation and the 50-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death, the 2018 Harvard Medical School’s Annual Bioethics Conference, took place from April 11 to 13 in Boston. An annual event of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics, this year’s confe...

“It was like he thought we were dirt.”