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Aim. Analysis of some controversial provisions of Article (Art.) 66 Determination of the Moment of Death of a Person and of Termination of Resuscitation Activities of Federal law On Fundamental Healthcare Principles in the Russian Federation of November 21, 2011 №323-FL (FL 323) directly concerning the issue of death of a person, and justification of making amendments to the title and text of the above mentioned norm. Due to the absence of definition of the concept of death in FL 323, the author presents his own definition of death of a person. The used term the moment of death of a person as a determinant/indicator of the occurrence of death seems to be erroneous. This term cannot be extended to the fact of biological death. Under FL 323, death of the brain is considered to be equivalent to death of a person and today is inextricably linked with organ transplantation. However, in reality it is not so, and in this sense it is a typical juridical fiction that justifies legal removal of organs from living patients. Amendments to the title and wording of Article 66 FL 323 are proposed.

Artykuł jest próbą nakreślenia podstawowych wątków dzisiejszej sytuacji humanistyki wobec wyzwań, jakie stają przed człowiekiem jako gatunkiem dążącym do destrukcji świata. Główną teza szkicu jest następująca: nauki o człowieku muszą przeformułować swoje sposoby uprawomocnienia i tworzenia wiedz oraz procedur prawdy. W artykule autor stara się pokazać zasadnicze elementy kryzysu biologicznego, technologicznego, środowiskowego i klimatycznego w kontekście kryzysu dyskursywnego i politycznego, który przejawia się w odrodzeniu wyobraźni apokaliptycznej. Momro outlines the key themes currently bearing on the humanities with regard to the challenges that humanity faces as a species that destroys the planet. His main thesis is that the humanities must reformulate their ways of legitimising and creating knowledge and truth procedures. Momro highlights the essential elements of the biological, technological, environmental and climate crisis in the context of the discursive and political crisis that emerges with the revival of the apocalyptic imagination.

Drawing on a recent case report of a pregnant, brain-dead woman who gave birth to a healthy child after over seven months of intensive care treatment, this essay rejects the established doctrine in medicine that brain death constitutes the biological death of the human being. The essay describes three policy options with respect to determination of death and vital organ transplantation in the case of patients who are irreversibly comatose but remain biologically alive.

The basic challenges and criteria of spiritual education of students are determined. It was emphasized that the works of Ukrainian literature, in particular the sentimental novels and short stories of Gregory Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, play an important role in the system for concluding a scale of universal human values. It is noted that the artistic text encourages spiritual purification. The analysis was carried out on the example works by G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko. It is emphasized that G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko as a new-time writer no longer applies the principles of four-dimensional methods of interpreting the Bible as a stylistic and formative dominant in the process of artistic creation of the Christian model of the world. However, the Bible is present in the author's artistic texts at the level of allusions, reminiscences, paraphrases. G. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko by depiction of reality, as well as baroque artists such as, for example, Ioannikiy Galyatovskiy or Grigoriy Skovoroda, within the limits of the canons of biblical hermeneutics, shared the ambient «heavenly» and «earthly» spheres. The writer preferred the «heavenly» that a person can achieve after biological death, which he was not aware of as end, but as the beginning of a new existence.

Dilated pupils are traditionally considered one of the main signs of clinical death and brain death. Although in clinical practice even in biological death pupil size often remains medium. Pupil size evaluation is not included into modern CPR protocols and brain death diagnostics protocols., Расширение зрачков традиционно считается одним из основных признаков клинической смерти и смерти мозга. Однако в клинической практике нередко даже после наступления биологической смерти диаметр зрачка остается средним. Оценка диаметра зрачков не входит в современные протоколы сердечно-легочной реанимации и диагностики смерти мозга., Розширення зіниць традиційно вважається однією з основних ознак клінічної смерті і смерті мозку. Однак в клінічній практиці нерідко навіть після настання біологічної смерті діаметр зіниці залишається середнім. Оцінка діаметру зіниць не входить у сучасні протоколи серцево-легеневої реанімації і діагностики смерті мозку.

Death is defined biologically as the irreversible loss of the functioning of the organism as a whole, which typically occurs after the loss of cardiorespiratory function. In 1968, a Harvard committee proposed that death could also be defined neurologically as the irreversible loss of brain function. Brain death has been considered to be equivalent to cardiorespiratory arrest on the basis of the belief that the brain is required to maintain functioning of the organism as a whole and that without the brain, cardiorespiratory arrest and biological death are both rapid and certain. Over the past 20 years, however, this equivalence has been shown to be false on the basis of numerous cases of patients correctly diagnosed as brain-dead who nevertheless continued to survive for many years. The issue reached national attention with the case of Jahi McMath, a young woman diagnosed as brain-dead after a surgical accident, who survived for almost 5 years, mostly at home, supported with a ventilator and tube feedings. The fact that brain death is not biological death has many implications, notably including the concern that procurement of organs from brain-dead donors may not comply with the so-called dead donor rule, which requires that vital organs be procured from patients only after they are dead. In this article, I conclude with an analysis of options for moving forward and among them advocate for reframing brain death as a “social construct,” with implicit societal acceptance that patients diagnosed as brain-dead may be treated legally and ethically the same as if they were biologically dead.

The question in the medical profession over the definition of biological death, Robert Glaser suggests, appears to have been resolved, practically speaking, in favor of the brain, rather than the heart or lungs, as the place where human life makes its last stand. Social death begins when the institution, accepting impending death, loses its interest or concern for the dying individual as a human being and treats him as a body—that is, as if he were already dead. A human institution, or social organization, acquires an integrity of its own, of course. Hospital deaths are commonly preceded by a period of what is generally regarded as a coma. Physicians in the private hospital were especially sensitive to the interpretation that might be made should they characterize the patient’s condition as “terminal.” The discovery of death—always an event of some social consequence—typically occurred in the course of ongoing ward activity of all kinds.

Brain death, or the determination of death by neurological criteria, has been described as a legal fiction. Legal fictions are devices by which the law treats two analogous things (in this case, biological death and brain death) in the same way so that the law developed for one can also cover the other. Some scholars argue that brain death should be understood as a fiction for two reasons: the way brain death is determined does not actually satisfy legal criteria requiring the permanent cessation of all brain function, and brain death is not consistent with the biological conception of death as involving the irreversible cessation of the functioning of an organism as a whole. Critics counter that the idea that brain death is a legal fiction is deceptive and undemocratic. I will argue that diagnosing brain death as a hidden legal fiction is a helpful way to understand its historical development and current status. For the legal-fictions approach to be ethically justifiable, however, the fact that brain death is a legal fiction not aligned with the standard biological conception of death must be acknowledged and made transparent.

During the 2015 Palestinian ‘al-Quds’ uprising, more than 80 Palestinians were killed and their corpses were held by Israel in freezers. Fifteen of these corpses belonged to women and girls. This article draws on ethnographic data and traces the rites of passage of three Palestinian women’s corpses, examining the intersectionality between colonial, social-patriarchal, and resistance performances during their (in)secure life and death. Based on interviews with the women’s families, it examines the necropolitical and biopolitical powers inscribed over women’s frozen dead bodies. Necropolitics in this case is not only the decision about who deserves to live and who deserves death but also the decision about the structure of the dead body’s time-space, about its social-political and biological death. It is about allowing or disallowing burial, grief, and bereavement. Muting, erasing, and managing the death rites of the Palestinian women martyrs, calls for stepping beyond existing Western theory on the linearity, ‘liminality’, ‘anomaly’, and ‘abjection’ of death.

In this paper, I argue that brain death is death because, despite the appearance of genuine integration, the brain-dead body does not in fact possess the unity that is proper to a human organism. A brain-dead body is not a single entity, but a multitude of organs and tissues functioning in a coordinated manner with the help of artificial life support. In order to support this claim, I first lay out Hoffmann and Rosenkrantz’s ontological account of the requirements for organismal unity and summarize an earlier paper in which I apply this account to the brain death debate. I then further support this ontological argument by developing an analogy between the requirements for the unity of an organism and the requirements for the unity of an orchestra. To do so, I begin by examining the role that a conductor plays in unifying a traditional orchestra, and then go on to show that the human organism (at least in postnatal stages) functions like a traditional orchestra that relies upon a conductor (the brain) for its unity. Next, I consider the conditions required to achieve orchestral unity in conductorless orchestras and show that, in contrast to simpler organisms like plants, the postnatal human organism lacks those conditions. I argue, in other words, that although conductorless orchestras do exist, the human organism is not one of them. Like a traditional orchestra without a conductor, the brain-dead body is not a unified whole.

This chapter is based on ethnographic research in the virtual, 3D social world of Second Life. Identities and social relationships are constructed through avatars in social and game worlds that are part of this larger, complex story of digital life and death, rituals of mourning and memorialisation, and the fragile futures of online sites and virtual worlds. The chapter focuses on the forum data and selected interviews on the difficulty of mourning losses that is not resolved because there is no symbolic act or marker of a social death. The name Second Life provokes the ordering categories as a first and second life and by extension a first and second death. Community forum posts also engages the veracity of claims to real biological death as many people fake their second life death by faking their real-life death. Second life social deaths can remain undiscovered, or discovered in delayed and uneven temporalities.

In this contribution we present graph theoretical approach to image processing focus on biological data. We use the graph cut algorithms and extend them for obtaining segmentation of biological cells. We introduce completely new algorithm for analysis of the resulting data and sorting them into three main categories, which correspond to the certain type of biological death of cells, based on the mathematical properties of segmented elements.

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized.

The article verifies the key issues from the area of contemporary fertility. Its main purpose is to describe the phenomenon of “fertility regression” and point to activities undertaken by the Church to help marriages that perform procreative functions and undertake responsible parenthood. The article refers to the reasons behind diminishing birth rates, their scope and the question of demographic renewal. The Church knowingly assists fertility issues on many levels: religious, cultic, economic, social, and mental. Accompanying family in procreation and education of children the Church cooperates with the activities undertaken by the State. It is obvious that every citizen is a social good and without replacement of generations every nation is doomed to “biological death”.

Several genetic and epigenetic theories have been suggested to explain the intricacies of life and death. However, several questions remain unsettled regarding cellular death events, particularly of living tissue in the case of cancer patients, such as the fate and adaptation of cancer cells after biological death. It is possible that cancer cells can display the intent to communicate with the external environment after biological death by means of molecular, genetic, and epigenetic pathways. Whether these cancer cells contain special information in the form of coding that may help them survive beyond the biological death of cancer patients is unknown. To understand these queries in the cancer field, we hypothesize the epigenomic hard drive (EHD) as a cellular component to record and store global epigenetic events in cancerous and non-cancerous tissues of cancer patients. This mini-review presents the novel concept of EHD that is reinforced with the existing knowledge of genetic and epigenetic events in cancer. Further, we summarize the EHD understanding that may impart much potential and interest for basic and clinical scientists to unravel mechanisms of carcinogenesis, therapeutic markers, and differential drug responses.

This chapter is one of two conceptual chapters that set up the analytical foundation for the remaining empirical case studies which are mainly historical in character. The first chapter focuses on the question: what is death? The secondary question: when death occurs, depends on what we think death is. This chapter addresses a number of questions: What and when is biological death? Can biological death be understood as an absolute state and/or is it partially present in the process of dying? What is social death? When is social death co-terminus with biological death? When is it not? How can we characterise the meaningful similarities and differences between biological and social death? Why should this matter?

Brain dead organ donors are the principal source of transplantable organs. However, it is controversial whether brain death is the same as biological death. Therefore, it is unclear whether organ removal in brain death is consistent with the 'dead donor rule', which states that organ removal must not cause death. Our aim was to evaluate the public's opinion about organ removal if explicitly described as causing the death of a donor in irreversible apneic coma. We conducted a cross-sectional internet survey of the American public (n=1096). Questionnaire domains included opinions about a hypothetical scenario of organ removal described as causing the death of a patient in irreversible coma, and items measuring willingness to donate organs after death. Some 71% of the sample agreed that it should be legal for patients to donate organs in the scenario described and 67% agreed that they would want to donate organs in a similar situation. Of the 85% of the sample who agreed that they were willing to donate organs after death, 76% agreed that they would donate in the scenario of irreversible coma with organ removal causing death. There appears to be public support for organ donation in a scenario explicitly described as violating the dead donor rule. Further, most but not all people who would agree to donate when organ removal is described as occurring after death would also agree to donate when organ removal is described as causing death in irreversible coma.

Purpose: To show that the concept of “brain death” is a purely utilitarian construct which does not have adequate medical foundation.Methods: Presentation of known and novel arguments from the medical literature and unknown arguments from the philosophical literature.Results: There are multiple self-evident inconsistencies, contradictions and logical errors inherent in the concept of “brain death” according to which this concept is obviously invalid.Conclusion: It is considered unavoidable that the only honest option is the definitive abandonment of the concept of “brain death”.

The article reviews difficulties and typical mistakes during the cardiopulmonary and cerebral resuscitations on the prehospital stage and indicates the main reasons of their appearance and here is announced new modern methodologies of resuscitation measures that will assist for minimization of these errors. Also, here is highlighted the renovated legal and ethical aspects of cardiopulmonary and cerebral resuscitations.

Death has important medical, legal and societal implications making it imperative that its determination is accurate, reliable and certain. Despite it being more than 40 years since the concept of ‘brain death’ was first introduced into clinical practice, many of the controversies that surround the determination of death by neurological criteria (DNC), a more focused and accurate description of the process, have not been settled and present an opportunity for future research and education to clarify outstanding issues in order to reduce professional and public disquiet [1]. While the philosophical and religious issues that surround the determination of DNC in some cultures will continue to generate debate, there has been limited success in resolving scientifically more pragmatic issues including the substantial international variation in DNC definitions, and the equivalence of DNC with an individual’s biological death.

This review will outline various ways in which the notion of 'social death' can be understood, and how they can be related to clinical practice. The idea of social death is used to analytically represent how someone can be identified and treated as if they are ontologically deficient - meaning that they are not seen as being 'fully human.' This impacts on their position within society and how they are interacted with. This review will consider three examples of social death - often distinguished from physical or biological death - that are important for clinical practice: loss of agency and identity; treating people as if they are already dead; and, rituals and bereavement. Recognising that a distinction between social and biological death may not always be helpful, this review will suggest ways in which healthcare practitioners can minimise the likelihood of inadvertently treating someone as 'socially dead'.

This book is a philosophical exploration of postmortem survival. In the broad sense, “postmortem survival” refers to the continued existence of the self or some significant aspect of our mental life or psychology after biological death. More precisely stated, this book is a philosophical examination of certain arguments that have been proposed in favor of postmortem survival during the past century, what the twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad called “empirical arguments for survival” (1960: 514–51). These arguments aim to infer survival from various ostensible features of the empirical world, the publicly observable world known through sense experience.

In this paper, we present a ultraweak photon emission (UPE) measurement system to identify the biological death process. Using medical mouse, the relationship between the photon number of UPE and death process was investigated in our research work. The comparison between the normal living state and biological death process shows that there was an obvious increasing trend of the ultraweak photon emission number just before biological objects died. The results suggest that UPE may be used as a method to observe the physiology activities, and also identify the process of death and the state of living.

This paper is concerned with the social life of a deceased Tibetan Buddhist lama. It details the role of death and successive lives in a lifestory that ends not with the passing of the subject but with his rebirth. Ethnographic attendance to tales told about the lama's death and reincarnation, and their textualization in the Tibetan convention of hagiography, or namtar, draw attention to quintessentially Tibetan understandings of the lifecourse. I argue that posthumous forms of the lama challenge the notion of biological death, and, in so doing, demonstrate that life can continue in new mediums including relics, reincarnation and hagiographical representations.

Many accounts of the historical development of neurological criteria for determination of death insufficiently distinguish between two strands of interpretation advanced by advocates of a "whole-brain" criterion. One strand focuses on the brain as the organ of integration. Another provides a far more complex and nuanced account, both of death and of a policy on the determination of death. Current criticisms of the whole-brain criterion are effective in refuting the first interpretation, but not the second, which is advanced in the 2008 President's Council report on the determination of death. In this essay, I seek to further develop this second strand of interpretation. I argue thatpolicy on determination of death aligns moral, biological, and ontological death concepts. Morally, death marks the stage when respect is no longer owed. Biologically, death concerns integrated functioning of an organism as a whole. But the biological concepts are underdetermined. The moral concerns lead to selection of strong individuality concepts rather than weak ones. They also push criteria to the "far side" of the dying process. There is a countervailing consideration associated with optimizing the number of available organs, and this pushes to the "near side" of death. Policy is governed by a conviction that it is possible to align these moral and biological death concepts, but this conviction simply lays out an agenda. There is also a prescription―integral to the dead donor rule―that lexically prioritizes the deontic concerns and that seeks to balance the countervailing tendencies by using science-based refinements to make the line between life and death more precise. After showing how these concerns have been effectively aligned in the current policy, I present a modified variant of a "division" scenario and show how an "inverse decapitation problem" leads to a conclusive refutation of the nonbrain account of death. Defense of the DDR and of a "Whole-Brain" Criterion for Determination of Death 331.

In an age in which vast progress has been made in organ transplant technology, it is imperative to determine the point at which a human being is considered dead, for transplantation cannot occur until after death. Traditional religious views imply that a human being is dead upon the departure of the soul from the body. Taking the biological death of the body as a conclusive sign of the soul's departure is not an option. Biological death refers to decomposition, and this cannot equate to the death of the person as such, for this would make the concept and practice of transplantation absurd, for transplantable parts of a biologically dead—i.e. decomposing—body could not be used. On the other hand, if parts of the human body are themselves still biologically alive, could it not be said that taking such parts would amount to murder? Two conclusions follow from this predicament. First, death as a ‘normative’ concept stands in sharp distinction from a purely biological concept. Second, a normative conc...

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) developed his theory of subjectivity, confronting the problem of desire as the core of existence, and arguing that no other question could help us more in our struggle to understand the question of what human nature is and how it is constructed. In the Lacanian vision, a subject continues to be born, to develop throughout one’s lifetime, and to die; however, this process is not identical to the biological change in an organism, since the birth and the death of the Lacanian subject are dependent upon the network of symbolic law and language. For Lacan, the death of the subject does not refer to biological death, but to the moment when the subject transcends the symbolic trap and experiences her or his own desire in the form of mystic experience or sublimation. Lacan analyzes a subject’s mystical experience as a form of symbolic death, mainly using the concept of death drive and jouissance.

Bereavement can be described as a universally experienced set of negative emotional stages following the loss of an object we hold dear.1 This typically involves the loss of people through physical separation or biological death, but can occur in a variety of circumstances, including separation from childhood toys or the loss of a limb through accident and amputation.2 To be able to experience such a personal loss we must first have formed an attachment to something, or typically someone. A psychological attachment is “the strong, affectionate tie we have with special people in our lives that leads us to feel pleasure when we interact with them and to be comforted by their nearness during times of stress”.3 Bowlby presented a general theory of attachment between people, particularly with regard to understanding attachments between child and caregiver.4 He considered terminations of attachment through death, and observed that people commonly experience emotional shock, and then physiological stress and anxiety from such loss (termed separation anxiety).5 However, over time the bereaved will come to accept the loss, readjust to the situation, and form new attachments.

The subjunctive voice is often disparaged as no longer of any use in the English language. Here it is argued to have a special place in the construction of possibility in therapeutic conversation with persons who are grieving. In particular, the subjunctive is illustrated in a case study of a re-membering conversation; that is, one in which relational and community membership is considered to live on in a narrative sense after biological death. The argument is that such conversations can produce more sustenance for people in a time of grief than the usual emphasis on confronting “reality” and accepting loss.

Protocols for retrieving vital organs in consenting patients in cardiovascular arrest (non-heart beating donors, NHBD) rest on the assumptions that irreversible asystole a) identifies the instant of biological death, and b) is clinically assessable at the time when retrieval of vital organs is possible. Unfortunately both assumptions are flawed. We argue that traditional life/death definitions could be actually inadequate to represent the reality of dying under intensive support, and we suggest redefining NHBD protocols on moral, social, and antrhopological criteria, admitting that irreversible (however defined) asystole can only equate a clinically determinable point of no return in the process of dying, where organ retrieval can be morally and socially accepted in previously consenting patients.

The whole-brain criterion of death was first formally proposed by the "Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death" in a "Special Communication" published in JAMA in 1968. Since then, all states in the United States and many western countries have endorsed this definition of death. The strongest defense of the concept of "brain death" was provided by Bernat, Culver, and Gert in a series of papers published in the early 1980s, emphasizing the important distinctions between the definition and the criteria of death and the tests for death. Careful analysis, however, demonstrates that brain-related criteria of death are inconsistent with traditional concepts of death. Thus, although death is properly understood as a biological phenomenon, "brain death" is a social construct created for utilitarian purposes, primarily to permit organ transplantation. The best definition of death is "the event that separates the process of dying from the process of disintegration" and the proper criterion of death in human beings is "the permanent cessation of the circulation of blood." Nevertheless, because brain-related criteria of death have been widely accepted, and because our society has demonstrated a strong commitment to organ transplantation, abandoning the concept of brain death would create serious political problems. Abandoning the "dead donor rule" would solve the problem of obtaining organs for transplantation, but would create different, equally serious, political problems. Preserving the concept of brain death as a social construct, as a "legal definition of death," but distinct from biological death, is also problematic, but may be our most acceptable alternative.

The discussion here has suggested that it is likely that the following beliefs are myth conceptions: Living is always prefarable to dying. It is possible for people not to “play God.” We can be sure that what happens biologically is willed by God. God speaks to us only through our biology. Dying occurs only at one point in time-at the end of the “terminal period.” “Death” or “dead” are more accurate labels than “passed on.” Persons who are dying know without being told that they are dying. Biological death is the most important thing happening when a person dies. The goal of achieving understanding of our death-related behavior can be facilitated by recognition of myth-conceptions such as these and the previously identified myths the acceptance of which may have an impact upon both biological and mental or spiritual health of those involved.