Ethical Transplant Practices

The first chapter of our assigned reading was basically all about when a person is pronounced dead. Is it when the heart stops beating? How about when you are brain dead? As of now, by law, a person is pronounced dead when they are brain dead. Even though someone could be brain dead it does not necessarily mean that every bodily function stops as well. We open this chapter with a description of a woman who was brain dead, yet there were doctors flying in from all over the country to take her heart, liver and kidneys in order to save another human being.
Brain dead is defined as "the irreversible end of all brain activity..." (Wikipedia). Basically, the human will have no recovery. When I first read this chapter, it was a little unsettling to me knowing that they were cutting and tearing apart a woman who still had a beating heart and fully functioning organs; however, after reading the definition of what it means to be brain dead, I think that it made the surgery easier to deal with especially because her parts were going to save another humans life. It was her choice to become an organ donor, so this should have been expected. This does however raise the question of who and what draws the line between life and death.

In the next chapter of the assigned reading, the chapter was about human head transplants! When I first started to read that doctors have gotten decapitated human heads to open their eyelids I was very freaked out. I think this type of surgery would never ever become a reality just because of the fact of: 1. the difficulty of getting a readily human head to the sight of a decapitation, and 2. after the procedure, the family and friends of whose head was decapitated will have a whole new face!!! (freaky). I do think this practice is more of an exploration and a "do we think we can do it" type of experiment. While I was reading through this chapter it reminded me of when we read Frankenstein and how he, in a sense, became godlike because he created a human (monster in his eyes) out of nonliving parts. Because human head transplants and getting a decapitated head to opens its eyes are so unnatural, just like Frankenstein's creation, it makes the doctors performing the procedures sort of like a Frankenstein. If a transplant did happen, the doctor would probably see it as a monster instead of something beautiful, just like Frankenstein's reaction.