Abstract
Ever since its inception in the 1950s, organ transplantation has been accompanied by questions about the ethics of taking organs from the dead and living and giving them to others. Discussions abound among physicians, ethicists, policy makers, and the public. At first living and willing relatives were used as organ sources for transplantation, due to antigenic incompatibility between unrelated persons. But with the development of powerful immunosuppressive drugs came an increase in cadaveric grafts. The supply shortage of transplantable organs stimulated society to search for new ways of procuring them. At the end of the 1960s, when surgeons first contemplated the systematic use of irreversibly unconscious patients as a source of human organs, a new legal definition of death was urgently needed to protect physicians from being charged with murder. It was essential that the new death be a diagnosable event and that it be timed to allow the removal of organs before onset of ischaemia.
