The Vatican has caused a stir by appearing to want to redefine death and then denying any such thing. If where there’s smoke, there’s fire, we haven’t heard the end of this yet.

It all started with a front-page article in the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano challenging the widely-accepted concept that brain death — the irreversible end of all brain activity — is the right standard for determining that someone has died. The article argued that doctors developed that standard 40 years ago to enable them to harvest organs for transplantation. The article by Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian history professor and bioethicist, argued:

“The scientific justification of (the brain death standard) rests on a peculiar definition of the nervous system that is now being questioned by new research, which casts doubt on the fact that brain death leads to the disintegration of the body … The idea that the human person ceases to exist when the brain no longer functions, while the body is kept alive thanks to artificial respiration, implies an identification of the person with brain activity alone. This contradicts the concept of the person according to Catholic doctrine and thus contradicts the directives of the Church in the case of patients in a persistent coma.”

The Vatican accepts organ transplantation and the brain death standard, which is widely used in Catholic hospitals. Declaring the brain death criterion un-Catholic would mean those hospitals would have to revert to the cardiac death standard alone. But that leaves a much smaller window for removing viable organs and would make one kind of transplantation — heart transplants — all but impossible. As it is, there is already such a shortage of organs for transplantation that scandalous black markets for them exist and some experts want to see organs sold like commodities on an open market.

The Vatican has not changed its view on brain death despite holding two scientific conferences (in 2005 and 2006) to discuss it, but there are dissenters among Catholic bioethicists like Scaraffia who want to keep the debate going. She used the 40th anniversary of the pioneering Harvard Report that advocated the brain death standard to call for a reassessment.

Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, got plenty of calls asking whether this was a change in the Church’s position. “This is not a Vatican document,” he responded. “It is an article by a historian that takes some considerations into account but it is not part of Church teaching.”

End-of-life issues are some of the most difficult challengesin ethics and some bioethicists say people should choose their definition of death in advance to ensure they don’t leave the moral quandary to others.

The influential New England Journal of Medicine reopened this long-standing debate last month with an article questioning whether some patients declared brain dead were in fact really dead. Patients with massive brain damage can be declared brain dead even though their vital bodily functions continue to work, wrote Robert Truog of Harvard Medical School and Franklin Miller of the National Institutes of Health. “The arguments about why these patients should be considered dead have never been fully convincing,” they wrote.

Another criterion, the end of a heart’s beating, seems questionable when doctors can declare cardiac death and the transplant and restart the heart in another patient, they said. These cases suggested, they argued, that “the medical profession has been gerrymandering the definition of death to carefully conform with conditions that are most favourable to transplantation”.

Another article reported that doctors in Denver had taken hearts from three brain-damaged infants within 75 to 180 seconds after their cardiac deaths and then successfully implanted and restarted them in other babies.

In the same series, bioethicist Robert Veatch of Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics wrote that declaring cardiac death and then transplanting the same heart amounted to “ending a life by organ removal”.

Do you think the ethical issues that Scaraffia brings up justify a challenge to the brain death criterion? Or should the priority be on making sure doctors have as many organs for transplant as possible?

UPDATE:  Sandro Magister has just put out a very thorough analysis of this issue on his blog www.chiesa. For the English-language version, click here.

Ask any altar server or visit any busy Chinese temple and you can smell for yourself that incense can be overpowering. But is it a mind-altering substance? A kind of drug that puts the faithful at ease and fosters feeling of peace and togetherness? And if it is, why aren’t more people flocking to services where clouds of incense billow up out of swaying golden thuribles, rise from joss sticks lit by the faithful or fill the air at other religious rituals?

The incense-as-a-drug thesis comes from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Their FASEB Journal has published a paper arguing there could be a biological basis for the use of incense because it seems to have the effect of a psychotropic drug that helps relax people.

As the scientists put it after testing this on mice,“incensole acetate (IA), a resin constituent, is a potent TRPV3 agonist that causes anxiolytic-like and antidepressive-like behavioral effects in wild-type (WT) mice with concomitant changes in c-Fos activation in the brain.”

Thanks to Meredith Small for translating that on the Live Science website to the more user-friendly statement: “Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free.” A component of the resin in question, she explains, is none other than “frankincense (yes, the same stuff brought to baby Jesus by the Three Kings).”

Does this jibe with your experience of incense?

(Hat tip to Salman Hameed at Science and Religion News)

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg has an intriguing idea: is there a “religionome” similar to the human genome and can scientists map it? He raised this idea at a recent Pew Forum conference on religion and public life in Key West, Florida, where he discussed the topic of why belief in God persists.

Newberg’s work focuses, among other things, on his view that we are biologically driven to find meaning in our lives. He argues that our brains have the capacity to create and perpetuate systems of belief that take us beyond our basic survival needs. These beliefs are biologically rooted in the brain, he thinks, but are also given form by our peers, parents and society.

Newberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Psychiatry, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and director and co-founder of the Center for Spirituality and the Neurosciences, all at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He talked with Reuters on the sidelines of the conference, organized by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, to flesh out his vision.

“If you think of it in the context of the human genome project, what we are talking about is finding a way of mapping all of the different aspects of religion, the different traditions and practices and experiences that people have,” he said.

“And by mapping it, I would not just be talking about the biology of it but trying to connect the biology with what people are actually experiencing, feeling, believing and therefore getting as full as possible a real understanding of what religion and spirituality are really all about for people.”

I asked him to further explain — in layman’s terms — what he saw as the biological basis of belief.

“What I think we have seen in the research we have done, what I would what to do in any kind of religionome type of study, would be to try and find the overall pattern of changes, the pattern of activity in the different structures in the brain that are involved with all the different types of processes that people consider to be religious or spiritual.”

“To expand on that a little bit, I have tended to find that there is a pattern of structures, a group of structures in the brain that seem to be involved whenever people engage in some kind of religious or spiritual activity. So what we tend to find is that there are a set of structures that are activated or inactivated depending on what a person is doing, how they’re doing it, what they’re trying to experience … while the pattern is a little bit different in each type of practice, it always seems to involve the same structures. It just involves them differently.”

The more we learn about the human body, the more some scientists search for a “God gene” or a religious zone in the brain or some other physical basis to account for the phenomenon of faith. Do you think science can explain faith?