What is death? Is it unavoidable? In the very first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768), death was defined as "the separation of the soul and body.
" Today, Encyclopedia Britannica Online defines it as "the total cessation of life processes that eventually occurs in all living organisms.
" The entry goes on to stipulate that "The state of human death has always been obscured by mystery and superstition, and its precise definition remains controversial, differing according to culture and legal systems.
"--an appropriate bit of legalese to illustrate the constantly shifting concept of death as understood in the modern world.
Death is ambiguous; it has always defied simple definitions.
Besides, if death is the cessation of life, we must first define life in order to develop a coherent understanding of its conclusion.
According to Wikipedia, modern physicists define life as "a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.
" (How's that for a mouthful?) Clearly, we're still struggling with the definition of life.
Perhaps, instead of struggling for a simple definition of death, we should attempt to identify its most basic attributes.
It is the general consensus that all living creatures must die.
This is clearly implied in the Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica definitions and has been a basic tenet of every definition of death I've uncovered thus far.
And yet ...
not all living creatures die.
An amoeba, for example, can live indefinitely--it just continues to divide, each time becoming two new amoebas.
In fact, according to Gerald Wald (The Origin of Death), death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution.
One can go a long way in evolution, he notes, before encountering an authentic corpse.
What about the human animal? Is it necessary that we die? Is death the unavoidable conclusion? Or is death merely a product of our inability to produce technologies that efficiently maintain the human organism? Traditionally, physicians based their diagnosis of death on a few simple observations.
A patient was considered dead if his heart had stopped beating and his lungs no longer pumped air.
But these straightforward observations produced enough faulty conclusions that a cloud of doubt often surrounded the pronouncement of death.
Certain unusual illnesses and even fainting spells had been known to mimic death, and there were documented cases (quote traumatic, one would imagine) in which people awoke in their own caskets.
The fortunate ones were still above ground.
It had become clear that a person might appear to the human eye to be dead without, in fact, being dead.
It was time to broaden our understanding of death.
During the eighteenth century, it was discovered that drowning victims, too, were not always as dead as they appeared.
Once this discovery was made public, there were many documented cases of successful resuscitations.
As the twentieth century approached, CPR, an emergency medical procedure for inducing artificial blood circulation and respiration, was developed; this advance dramatically increased the victim's odds of recovery.
Some visionaries even began to experiment with the technique of electrical stimulation.
Victorian scientists had toyed with the idea that a corpse could be reanimated by charging it with precisely the right amount of electricity.
While this theory proved false, twentieth-century physicians would eventually use a similar process called defibrillation to treat certain forms of cardiac arrhythmias and effectively bring "corpses" back to life.
Patients resuscitated by such processes forced doctors to reexamine the traditional concept of death, for they had temporarily met all the requirements to be diagnosed in that state, and yet here they were, as alive as the rest of us.
This raised obvious questions which had never before required an answer.
Does a temporary lapse into a deathlike state qualify as death? Or must death, by definition, be permanent? Even as these questions first became evident, they were almost immediately complicated by advances in the technology of life support systems which allowed physicians to prolong artificial respiration and other vital functions in patients who were no longer capable of "living" on their own.
For the first time, doctors and families had to face the reality of a persistent vegetative state.
Disturbing moral questions could no longer be ignored.
Were such patients still alive? Were they dead? Or were they trapped in some sort of hybrid state somewhere in the middle? Families were forced to watch the bodies of their loved ones live on, unsure whether any "spirit" remained or whether they would ever be able to interact with them again.
Soon, other advances in technology allowed physicians to monitor the electrical activity of the brain, and this resulted in the development of a new concept: brain death.
Researchers soon suggested that electro cerebral inactivity might be taken as a sign that irreparable damage had occurred within the brain and that no amount of therapy could return even minimal brain function to such patients.
This then, was the new definition of death--a lack of electrical activity in the brain.
Almost as soon as this new definition was adopted, other researchers began to argue that many patients diagnosed as "brain dead" might eventually, with the development of new technologies, be capable of regaining certain functions.
This concept has sparked heated debate, even within the families of patients trapped in this apparently lifeless position.
Some family members are willing to accept medical advice that there is nothing more they can do for their loved ones--others adamantly refuse to pull the plug, blindly hoping for a miracle cure that might be just around the corner.
Some scientists have gone so far as to suggest that advances in stem cell research and nanotechnology might one day allow doctors to rescue these patients from their deathlike state.
Such theoretical advances, however, are well beyond the scope of current technology and there is no guarantee that they will ever be realized.
Still, even today amazing advances continue to be made.
In the May 7, 2007 issue of Newsweek, scientists reported another remarkable discovery.
Traditionally, physicians have worked under the assumption that heart attack victims who do not receive CPR within five to ten minutes suffer irreversible damage to their cells from lack of oxygen and that beyond this brief window of opportunity the odds of resuscitation are virtually nonexistent.
But when researchers decided to test the truth of this dogma, what they discovered was amazing.
Watching oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope, they quickly discovered that more than an hour after they'd been cut off from their blood supply, the cells were still very much alive.
In fact, the heart cells were capable of surviving several hours without any oxygen.
It wasn't until oxygen was restored that the cells began to die.
Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death, but it does make one thing clear--even today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still learning about the nature of death, and every time our understanding deepens, that faded line between life and death gets a little fainter.
The idea promoted by some that technology will one day eliminate the concept of death altogether may still be science fiction ...
but who really knows for sure? Perhaps the most remarkable discoveries are still just around the corner.