Hastings Cent Rep. 2018 Nov;48 Suppl 4:S2-S5. doi: 10.1002/hast.942.
This special report is published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the "Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death," a landmark document that proposed a new way to define death, with implications that advanced the field of organ transplantation. This remarkable success notwithstanding, the concept has raised lasting questions about what it means to be dead. Is death defined in terms of the biological failure of the organism to maintain integrated functioning? Can death be declared on the basis of severe neurological injury even when biological functions remain intact? Is death essentially a social construct that can be defined in different ways, based on human judgment? These issues, and more, are discussed and debated in this report by leading experts in the field, many of whom have been engaged with this topic for decades.
本特刊是为纪念《哈佛医学院特别委员会报告：脑死亡定义的研究》发表五十周年而出版的。该报告是一份具有里程碑意义的文献，提出了一种新的死亡定义方式，对器官移植领域产生了深远的影响。尽管取得了这一显著的成功，但该概念引发了关于死亡含义的持久问题。死亡是否可以定义为生物体无法维持整体功能的生物学衰竭？即使生物功能保持完整，能否基于严重的神经损伤来宣布死亡？死亡是否本质上是一种社会建构，可以根据人类判断以不同方式定义？本报告由该领域的权威专家进行了讨论和辩论，其中许多专家已经研究这个课题几十年了。
