1. What breakthrough has been made with heart transplants? How has it changed the way heart transplants are done?

2. Describe how the “heart in a box” organ care machine works.

3. What is the benefit of the preservation solution used in the “heart in a box”?

4. What problem do recipients have when receiving “living” hearts for transplants?

5. a) How many more people’s lives can potentially be saved because of this breakthrough?
b) Why is this the case?

6. What two adjectives would you use to describe your reaction to this news story? Explain your answer.

7. This scientific breakthrough may help to address a dilemma regarding heart donation.

An ethical dilemma is faced with heart donation, in the fact that the heart must be removed from a person before it stops functioning/beating in the body—but after the person has been declared “brain dead.”

Defining death as “brain death,” even though the heart is still beating, presents ethical quandaries.

Robert D. Truog, MD, director of clinical ethics at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass., writes that using brain death as the standard legitimatizes organ removal from bodies that continue to have circulation and respiration (many times sustained by mechanical ventilation), and this "fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical understanding of death."

When do you think death occurs: a) Only once the heart stops beating, or b) When either the heart stops beating OR when a person is declared brain dead. Explain your answer.

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