The November-December 2018 issue of the Hastings Center Report celebrates two anniversaries. In a supplement to the issue, the fifty-year-old debate about what "dead" means-a debate launched in 1968 by the publication of the Harvard report on brain death-is dissected and reinvigorated in a set of essays assembled by Robert Truog, of Harvard Medical School's Center for Bioethics, and The Hastings Center's Nancy Berlinger, Rachel Zacharias, and Mildred Solomon. Inside the regular issue, a set of essays celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the novel about death, dissection, and reinvigoration and a touchstone for much commentary about emerging biotechnologies. Elsewhere in the issue are contrasting perspectives on physician-assisted death, and in the lead article, Danielle Wenner explores the requirement, often noted but recently challenged, that medical research must have "social value" to be worth conducting.
© 2018 The Hastings Center.