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Editorial: “A matter of life and brain death“

Chop off a rat’s head, and a minute later a wave of electrical activity passes through their brain. Is this the boundary between life and death?

WHEN people were guillotined in the French revolution, witnesses reported that sometimes the eyes on the decapitated heads would blink, or lips would twitch.

Enthralled audiences wondered: was the victim still conscious? Such speculation about the precise moment of death has now been revived by an ethics experiment that uses the guillotine once more.

Anton Coenen, Tineke van Rijn and their…