When exactly are you allowed to deliberately block blood flow to the brain?

Are you familiar with something called the “partial resurrection” procedure? That’s how MedPage Today referred to it in a recent article. You might suppose it is some kind of transhumanist scheme to bring the dead back to life, but it is an emerging technique used by transplantation surgeons upon organ donors.

That is indeed the case: in this procedure, physicians declare a patient dead prematurely (shortly after heart failure), then deploy interventions to resume circulation in the patient in order to optimize organ viability. But – get this – they deliberately block the circulation of oxygenated blood from reaching the brain.

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