Using People with 'Brain Death' as Lab Rats

[Ekklesian]

Using People with 'Brain Death' as Lab Rats

Doctors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the NYU Langone Transplant Institute in New York City reported successfully implanting genetically modified pig kidneys into two

www.americanthinker.com

Medical ethicists are less impressed. Joel Zivot, M.D., M.A., J.M. wrote in an opinion piece for MedPage Today:​

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Broadly, the rightness or wrongness of this type of procedure [is] the consequence[] of a series of moral choices, thus far unreported and unexamined, and include the problems of brain death, human experimentation, consent, rationing, and animal rights.​

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He points out that the concept of "brain death" has turned people into resources, commodities to be used for the valuable vital organs they possess. Most people do not receive any type of informed consent when they selflessly sign a donor card at the Department of Motor Vehicles and have no idea that they can be considered "dead" while they are still respiring and have a beating heart. Or that doctors currently are not following the legal definition of death by neurologic criteria under the Uniform Determination of Death Act (or UDDA, some form of which has been passed into law by all 50 states). While the UDDA requires "cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem" for a diagnosis of "brain death," doctors now generally follow the 2010 American Academy of Neurology Guidelines, which require only documentation of coma, a bedside test of brainstem reflexes, and an apnea test. No other special studies of "the entire brain" are required.​