Dr. Joseph J. Fins is chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College in Ithaca, N.Y., and professor of medicine, public health and medicine in psychiatry. He is also an associate at the Hastings Center. He wrote A Palliative Ethic of Care: Clinical Wisdom at Life’s End.

Dr. James L. Bernat is professor of neurology and medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and heads the Bioethics Committee at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. He is the author of Ethical Issues in Neurology, 3rd ed.

Nancy Berlinger is deputy director and research scholar at the Hastings Center in Garrison, N.Y., and director of its Guidelines on End of Life Care project. She is the author of After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics of Forgiveness.

Read about end-of-life issues from the University of Washington’s Ethics in Medicine program.

Read an overview of end-of-life issues from the National Institutes of Health.

Read an Oct. 3, 2008, article in the online magazine Slate about medical ethics and end-of-life issues in the context of organ transplants.

See the text of Pope Benedict XVI’s Nov. 7, 2008, address on organ donation and defining death.

See an Oct. 9, 2009, report from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly that explores end-of-life issues. 

Read a Feb. 3, 2010, New York Times article that discusses the results of the new brain imaging study.