Medical and ethical dilemma in brain death.

For centuries, death has been defined, medically speaking, as the irreversible cessation of breathing and of nervous and cardiac activity. What radically changed this definition was the introduction of the concept "brain death" in 1968, by the "Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School". According to it, the irreversible coma was associated with brain death and considered to be a criterion for the diagnosis of the deceased individual. The evergrowing need for transplant organs (provided this respects the dead honor rule, stipulating that organs can't be harvested unless someone is deceased) lead to making arbitrary decisions regarding the establishment of the exact time of death during the process of "losing life". What actually triggers the controversy related to the concept of brain death is the dilemma of associating this concept with that of biologic death or death of the person, the difference between the two being made by whether the mental characteristics are accepted or not in defining and individualizing the death of the human being. Given these circumstances, a dilemma appears--that of defining the death of the individual: we define death, as it has been for centuries, as the moment when the cardio-respiratory function no longer exists, which leads to the loss of tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved through transplant. Yet, this may lead to manipulating the border between life and death, with the risk of trespassing each individual's right to life.