What is a guaranteed way to make organ donation, the chance to help someone who needs a transplant, into a dirty idea?
Deny you and your family any rights at all on what happens to you, that's what.
Since 1968, when criteria were first set for being brain dead, a whole lot has changed in neuroscience. Researchers now recognize that 'dead' does not mean the same thing it used to mean. Anna Bagenholm was dead for three hours and brought back to life. "I like my dead people cold, stiff, gray and not breathing," Dr. Michael A. DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center told Dick Teresi in The Wall Street Journal. "The brain dead are warm, pink and breathing."
We don't even know what brain dead is any more. 40 years ago splashing ice water in the ears and pokes eyes with a cotton swab may have been rigorous but now we know higher brain activity could still be occurring, but it isn't tested for.
Organ transplantation is a $20 billion per year business so perhaps the better way to go, Teresi argues, is not to check that box on your driver's license. Then your family has the right to ask for a blood flow study, or something more elaborate than icewater to establish you are gone.
And transplants may be a thing of the past anyway. In Not Science Fiction: The Road Map To Organ Transplants With No Waiting List I outlined how scientists grew a trachea from the patient's own adult stem cells - no waiting list, no immunosuppressive drugs, no rejection. The roadmap to the Big 5 transplants is right there, so maybe we won't be in such a rush to declare people dead.
What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card by Dick Teresi, Wall Street Journal
