Abstract
Death and dying have been mainstream topics in bioethics since its emergence as an academic field. Technology continues to challenge our concepts of a good death and how to draw the line between life and death. This issue of AJOB features two Target Articles and numerous commentaries on death and dying. Overby and colleagues discuss important informed consent issues that arise in organ procurement from patients declared dead by circulatory criteria. Their concern about inadequacies in the informed consent process applies to both donation after circulatory death and to brain death (the assumption that an un-informed statement at the DMV when getting a driver’s license is sufficient to constitute a binding first person consent is open to obvious criticism, even if one is entirely sympathetic to the goal). Some of the commentators continue the ongoing debate over whether DCD donors are truly dead in the time frame in which most procurement takes place. […]