Points of Interest, #33

     I welcome one and all again to my roundup of all that is well with my surfing the internet for hidden treasure of knowledge relating to all things mind, soul, and body.  This week I have great posts on death, death, and death.  Also parasitic stalkers, forbidden fruit, and Heavy Metal, and smell receptor farming to name just a few.  So dig in and enjoy the very best I could find-

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When is life no longer life?

Our technology has caused us to radically redefine our concept of death. The advent of the mechanical ventilator greatly prolonged our ability to preserve vital functions in comatose patients. We now have a arsenal of drugs that maintain the function of very sick hearts. In fact, we now have machines that can actually pump blood and oxygenate it on their own, called extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation. It is often used in babies with severe lung disease.

Death has historically, and continues legally, to be defined as the presence of the heartbeat. This technology presents a unique challenge to this idea. Technically, it we use a heart/lung machine during an open heart operation, we are operating on a dead patient. Thus the surgeon, legally if not in actuality, is raising the dead with the operation. Is this playing God, or was the patient really dead A legal rethinking of the matter was inevitable.