Report Roman correspondence

Of Alfredo de Matteo
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary (1968) of the first definition of the brain death criterion, by a medical commission created ad hoc by Harvard University to ethically justify the first vital organ transplants. On theFuture of the 4 An interesting interview came out in February, the signature of Lucia Bellaspiga, to the researcher at the Neurolesi Center of Messina, Silvia Marino.
The occasion is an international meeting that took place in Milan on 2 last February on disorders of conscience, organized by the Irccs Carlo Besta Neurological Institute Foundation.
The neurologist Marino has been working for several years to explore the most hidden residues of consciousness through techniques neuroimaging and to study the reactions of the brain stimulated by sounds, smells and images. To patients apparently deprived of contact with the outside world and immobile for months or years in their bed, the researcher explains in the interview, we administer stimuli of all kinds, above all thanks to the fundamental collaboration of family members. While this is happening, through functional magnetic resonance imaging we can see if the areas of the patient's brain are activated.
So we studied 27 people diagnosed with minimal consciousness e 23 in a vegetative state, and among the latter well 10 they have transitioned to a state of minimal consciousness. Therefore, reiterates the neurologist, the word irreversible applied to disorders of consciousness, including vegetative state, it is no longer usable.
After all, a few months ago the magazine Current Biology announced an important scientific experiment conducted by the Italian neuroscientist Angela Sirigu, who managed to recover the consciousness of a patient in a vegetative state through a prolonged series of electrostimulation of the vagus nerve. According to the scientific community at least the 40 percent of vegetative state diagnoses are incorrect, but the particularity of the case of the patient subjected to Sirigu's experiment concerns the fact that the certainty of the diagnosis seemed out of question, since he had no longer had any contact with the outside world since 15 years and his condition actually seemed irreversible.
Until the 1960s, Western legal and medical tradition believed that death should be ascertained by verifying the definitive cessation of all vital functions.: breathing, circulation, activity of the nervous system. Exactly fifty years ago, In the 1968, a committee established by Harvard Medical School proposed a new criterion for ascertaining death based on the definitive cessation of cerebral functions alone, the so-called irreversible coma. Since then, brain death is the criterion that allows the practice of vital organ transplants to be legally carried out in most countries in the world.
Ora, if the now achieved awareness of the unreliability of the parameter of brain death or irreversible coma pushes us to denounce the ongoing tendency aimed at reducing man to a simple agglomeration of organs, without conscience or soul, as happens for example with euthanasia, why it should not push us to denounce with equal determination the practice of so-called organ donation?
It too is not founded, upon closer inspection, on the same principles that led to the murder by sentence of Eluana Englaro or Terry Schiavo and which led the English judges to "pull the plug" on poor Charlie Gard?
Effectively, the ultimate criterion on the basis of which, Today, decides the fate of human beings is merely utilitarian and provides for the completely arbitrary distinction between lives worthy and unworthy of being lived, between useful and useless existences (to something or someone). Even organ donation does not escape the same philosophical principle that underlies other anti-life behaviors and furthermore is totally based on the anti-scientific criterion of brain death. One could object that it allows us to save human lives that would otherwise be destined to certain death. But at what cost? How many people have had their organs removed?, if you let it live, they could have woken up or improved their living conditions? And above all, how many of these patients were acutely conscious but unable to communicate?
All questions to which it is not possible to give a definitive answer. What is certain is that the battle in defense of life and against the culture of death cannot be conducted in a partial manner, that is, condemning certain practices and at the same time praising or not condemning others, which are subject to the same anti-human and anti-scientific criteria propagated by modernity