To underscore the coming controversy about the dead donor rule for organ transplant, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, Dr Franklin Miller, contends in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics (co-edited by John Harris) that abolition is the only sensible option:

 

“Where do we go from here? We face an unsettled and unsettling situation characterised by the moral imperative to continue vital organ transplantation, the entrenched norm that doctors must not kill, and the increasingly transparent fiction that the brain dead are really dead. In at least the near future it is probable that we will continue to muddle through. In the longer run, the medical profession and society may, and should, be prepared to accept the reality and justifiability of life-terminating acts in medicine in the context of stopping life-sustaining treatment and performing vital organ transplantation.” ~ Journal of Medical Ethics, Oct 2009