Inside the Heated Scientific Debate to Redefine Who Is Dead

It was March 10, 2022—day one of a virtual forum held over Zoom to re-write the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), a draft law that for four decades has been the basis for defining who is alive and who is dead in the United States. Many of those assembled were legal professionals who are members of the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a quasi-governmental entity whose origins go back 125 years. It’s a crowded meeting of five- dozen guests from both the legal and medical realms. Each one was eager to share their own perspective on an issue that at first glance may seem fairly cut and dry—until one really starts to dig deep into the legal and medical nuances behind trying to define death itself.

The ULC is the perfect forum for this kind of debate. Pandemonium can arise for laws that left up to states, each different state chooses to abide by its own wildly different set of rules.. When each state—and therefore the U.S. as a whole—would benefit from uniformity, the ULC drafts bills that are then presented to each legislature for adoption. Normally, that means wrestling with relatively mundane issues like child custody or trucking regulations.

That day, the ULC was taking on something more existential. Unfortunately, even matters of life and death are prone to Zoom hiccups. Dr. Malcolm Shaner, a neurologist at University of California Los Angeles, was running into some difficulties while trying to address the group.

Read more at The Daily Beast.