Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain

by Allan H. Ropper

Alan Shewmon, a respected neurologist and professor at UCLA Medical Center, has the audacity to claim that brain death is not death. He didn’t always believe this, but his worldview changed about a decade ago when he was presented with a patient, a fourteen-year-old boy, who suffered a severe head trauma after jumping onto the hood of a slow-moving car, falling off, hitting his head on the curb, and eventually being confirmed as brain dead. Yet he “lived” for another sixty-three days on a respirator and vital fluids. Dr. Shewmon was called in to examine the boy, and he agreed with the brain death determination. By the standards of the State of California, the boy was a corpse, but at the family’s insistence, the body was kept going in a facility under the care of nurses who were baffled and unsettled by that diagnosis. Shewmon reported that the boy began to go through puberty and eventually died, not from his head injury, but of pneumonia. How long can a body survive in a brain-dead state? Not indefinitely, but longer than most people think.