may be of interest...
JOURNAL OF EVOLUTION AND TECHNOLOGY, Volume 6, July 2001
The Future of Death: Cryonics and the Telos of Liberal Individualism
by James Hughes
http://www.jetpress....lume6/death.htm
Justice O’Connor put her finger on its contingent nature in a 1983 dissent:
The Roe framework…is clearly on a collision course with itself…As medical science becomes better able to provide for the separate existence of the fetus, the point of viability is moved further back toward conception. ... The Roe framework is inherently tied to the state of medical technology that exists whenever particular litigation ensues.” [462 U.S. 416, 458 (1983) (O'Connor, J., dissenting).]
In response, “whole-brainers” (Black 1978a; Black 1978b; Bernat 1989) have defended a standard requiring complete brain death. This standard was eventually endorsed by the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research in their report Defining Death (1981), and written into the Uniform Declaration of Death Act, which has been enacted in 36 states. Those laws declare:
Any individual who has sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. [National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws, 1980]
Linda Emanuel (1995), the top ethics attorney at the American Medical Association, has proposed that the law be redefined to recognize a “dying zone” between permanent unconsciousness and the cessation of respiration. Within that zone we would allow people to set their own definitions of death, allowing termination of care and organ removal up to permanent unconsciousness. No one should be euthanized who is above the zone, and no one should be buried or cremated until they have stopped breathing.
For instance, Dr. Alan Shewmon (1998), a neurologist at UCLA, has demonstrated that patients have survived more than ten years after being diagnosed as “brain dead.”
Emerging neuroremediation technologies will soon bring the unhappy whole brain death standard into full crisis. Stem cell research has demonstrated that the brain has the capacity to generate new pluripotent cells to repair brain damage, and that these cells migrate to damaged areas and take up necessary functions (Snyder et al., 1997; Yandava, 1999). Adenoviral vectors have been successfully used to introduce nerve growth factors, and stimulate nerve growth in damaged areas (Boulis et al., 1999). Parallel research has succeeded in blocking the chemical pathways that ordinarily suppress neural regeneration in the central nervous system.
Stephen Bridge (1994) and Alcor (2000) have summarized the legal advantages and disadvantages of the cryonics patient being considered dead or alive. If the cryonaut is dead, she can legally donate her body to Alcor for storage under the laws governing anatomic gifts. But she could decide to be “treated” at Alcor if she were considered alive. If the cryonaut is dead she can use life insurance policies to fund her suspension, and estate mechanisms to leave money for maintaining herself in cryostasis and providing for herself after reanimation. But if she was “alive” she could also leave her money in trusteeship.
The principal reason cryonicists are concerned about the definition of their status is because many would like to get frozen before they are legally dead, and to be treated as patients facing emergent care rather than as corpses. Not only must they wait until disease has potentially ravaged their brains, but “after death” they can be subjected to delays in freezing, and even autopsies, which make successful conservation of neural information impossible.
LongeCity
