You will die, sooner or later. We all will. For everything that has a beginning has an end, an ineluctable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Few of us like to think about this troubling fact. But once birthed, the thought of oblivion can’t be completely erased.
In 1968, the famous Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School introduced the concept of death as irreversible coma—that is, loss of brain function. Indeed, brain-dead bodies can continue to grow fingernails, to menstruate, with at least some working immune function that allows them to fight off infections. Despite technological advances, biology and medicine still lack a coherent and principled understanding of what precisely defines birth and death—the two bookends that delimit life.
In the absence of a precise conceptual formulation of when an organism is alive or dead, the concept of irreversibility depends on the technology du jour, which is constantly evolving. What at the beginning of the 20th century was irreversible—cessation of breathing—became reversible by the end of the century. Is it too difficult to contemplate that the same may be true for brain death?
