Brain Death

From the 1970s onward, the concept of brain death has become increasingly relevant to the determination of death. In most countries the determination of brain death is legally required before the organs can be taken out of a patient with complete and irreversible loss of consciousness and whose circulation and respiration is artificially maintained. For this reason, the concept of brain death is mainly ethically relevant to the practice of postmortal organ donation. This entry reviews the conceptual and ethical controversies of brain death in relation to organ donation. These controversies show, paradoxically, that ensuring public understanding of the value of organ donation requires that physicians and other stakeholders involved in the transplantation process should be sensitive to medical, social, and transcendent objections to the concept of brain death and to the ethical questions that arise from it.