The US President’s Council on Bioethics has released a white paper entitled Controversies in the Determination of Death. In this white paper, the Council explores the resurgent debates about the clinical and ethical validity of the neurological standard for determining death (along with some of the ethical concerns that have been spawned by the use of the cardiopulmonary standard in donation-after-cardiac-death organ procurement protocols).

You can download the white paper (in pdf form) by pasting the following link into your browser: http://www.bioethics.gov/reports/death/index.html