Heart Transplant Surgery - Is the Donor Dead?

There were questions internationally about whether or not this woman had been killed. Henry Beecher was an anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School and he immediately recognized an opportunity for career advancement here. In 1968, they outlined something they called an irreversible coma, which was like the first draft of what we now call brain death. The idea that if your brain has stopped functioning completely and you're never going to wake up, that should be considered as death.