"The truth is that the definition of brain death was proposed by Harvard Medical School in the summer of 1968, a few months after the first heart transplant performed by Christian Barnard (December 1967), to ethically justify heart transplants, which required that the heart of the donor still be beating, meaning that, according to traditional medical standards, he was still alive. In this case, the removal of the heart was equivalent to murder, albeit carried out “for a good cause”. Science posed a dramatic moral question: is it permissible to kill a sick person, even if they are terminally ill or irreversibly injured, in order to save another human life of superior “quality”?"
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Morte cerebrale. Interviene Roberto Di Mattei, Espresso.it, 8 September 2008
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sandro_Magister
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Sandro Magister
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