I recently posted a brief essay on The Conversation about the ethics of trying to regenerate the brains of brain dead patients (earlier version posted later on Practical Ethics). Tonight I am giving interviews on BBC World radio about it.

The quick of it is that it will mess with our definitions of who happens to be dead, but that is mostly a matter of sorting out practice and definitions, and that it is somewhat questionable who is benefiting: the original patient is unlikely to recover, but we might get a moral patient we need to care for even if they are not a person, or even a different person (or most likely, just generally useful medical data but no surviving patient at all). The problem is that partial success might be worse than no success. But the only way of knowing is to try.