Solely Soulless: The Heart or the Head?

How to know if you're dead addresses many terrifying thought.  For those you that will be donating their organs to help others after they pass away, how do you know that you will actually be dead?  I'm not sure how Roach could watch the surgeon cut out a beating heart!  Yes, the patient was brain dead, but they still referred to the patient, as a breathing living patient who needed to be cared for!  If we have the technology to keep one's body alive even when they are "dead," where does the line get drawn?  As Roach refers to us "law-types" not trusting the medical types to get it right, I find it hard to believe that desperate people won't try to inch the line.  What about people in coma or in a persistent vegetative state?  Those in a vegetative state have suffered sever damage to their cortex and might even be non-functional.  Are they brain-dead?  Some people in these vegetative states, like Terri Schiavo, are taken off life support and left to die.  Could people petition to take patient's with disorder of consciousness organs?  Roach almost demonizes family members who chose not to donate organs to others in need.  If my mom was in a coma, I wouldn't be able to say, alright her life is done, cut her up and give her to others because her heart was still beating.  And even if my mom was already "dead" but her body was still alive, I'd still have a hard time with it.  If I could feel the warmth of her body and see her pulse, I couldn't agree to donation.  Why?  Because keeping a body alive is HUMANIZING a cadaver, it's humanizing the dead.  The emotional tow would be too great for me, allowing surgeons to take her heart while it is still beating.

      As for head/body transplants, that's too wack-a-doodle for me to get behind.  If Dr. White did a transplant operation on a human, it'd be too frankenstein for me.  An organ is one thing, but the whole body has a story.  I can't imagine waking up with my head on a different body.  Having a scar on my left knee and not knowing the story behind it.  I would want to know the story behind my donor's body, and like Roach reported in the book - would I become more like that person subconsciously?  Anyways, like I said, it's too frankenstein for me.  I had a hard time reading the puppy and monkey transplants because I was imagining freakish monsters as a product.  That is mad science.  That is Mickey Mouse watching the Mad Scientist's plan to put Pluto's head on a chicken's body.

- Kristyna