...The deceptive argument that death of the brain, and therefore of the person, could be diagnosed clinically while the body remains alive and perfused by its naturally-beating heart, appears to have had its origins in Cape Town in 1967. The 1968 Ad Hoc Harvard Committee charged with examining brain death gave it formal status - but, as Veatch now reveals, “none of the members was so naïve as to believe that people with dead brains (sic) were dead in the traditional biological sense of the irreversible loss of bodily integration”. Instead, they “proposed an entirely new definition of death, one that assigned the label ‘death’ for social and policy purposes to people who no longer are seen as having the full moral standing assigned to other humans”.Whether or not that was the understanding of those who subsequently enacted legislation allowing the certification of death on ‘brain death’ criteria in the USA, there seemed to be a worldwide willingness to follow that lead. The concepts of death which the criteria in current use are held to uphold have been the subject of much philosophical debate, the level of public understanding of which should be a matter of concern. The variety of the diagnostic criteria belies their ability to identify a discrete clinical entity - or even, with the desirable certainty, a syndrome with an inevitably imminently fatal outcome...
...In the present state of knowledge, there is no sound scientific basis for the diagnosis of human death on the so-called “brain death” or “brain stem death” clinical criteria in current use worldwide.
The above comes from Dr. David W. Evans' unedited contribution to Finis Vitae: Is Brain Death Still Life?, published by Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche. The full essay can be read here.
