Since the 1960s there have been especially heated debates about how to distinguish between human biological and human personal life, and about the force and significance of the distinction. in a 1989 article on the bioethical issues of organ transplantation and brain-dead phenomenon states: Organ transplantation practice has stimulated a range of bioethical issues about the ambiguous nature of the brain-dead phenomenon, entangled and hybridized forms of human subjectivity, and the notions of personhood, and embodiment. The current culture of organ transplantation has problematized our shared notion of life and death and has created an immediate need to medico-legally distinguish a section of humans who are merely corporeally alive from those who are acknowledged as members of a politically agentic community. How maybe, after the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line…how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off. He’d have known, too, he was raising questions to which even the doctors had no certain answers. 4 Kathy throws light on the ambiguous nature of the brain-dead patients who are kept on ventilator for organ retrieval thus:īut Tommy would have known I had nothing to back up my words. 2 Tommy states that the anxiety and ambiguity associated with the brain-dead phenomenon 3 is further augmented because of the medical practitioners’ inability to state definitely that the patient diagnosed with irreversible coma is dead. If you knew for certain you’d complete, it would be easier.

Tommy states, “You know why it is, Kath, why everyone worries so much about the fourth? It’s because they’re not sure they’re really complete.

While awaiting his fourth donation, Tommy often shares his suspicion with Kathy about the medical diagnosis of a patient as dead. 1 In Ishiguro’s novel, the human clone Kathy narrates the existential anxieties of Tommy and other clones who are waiting for their fourth organ donation after the completion of which they will be medically declared as dead. In his 2005, dystopian novel Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro speculates on the ethical issues of organ transplantation and human cloning, while also dramatizing the anxiety associated with the brain-dead phenomenon accepted as the extended ontology of death by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School in the year 1968.

Brain robin cook