Brain Death and Mandatory Organ Donation

Without taking a public position on the halachics of organ donation and whether brain death = death, I just would like to point out two salient articles.

The first is an opinion piece in Wired calling for mandatory organ donation (possibly with an opt-out):

"Routine recovery would be much simpler and cheaper to implement than proposals designed to stimulate consent because there would be no need for donor registries, no need to train requestors, no need for stringent government regulation, no need to consider paying for organs, and no need for permanent public education campaigns," wrote Aaron Spital, a clinical professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and James Stacey Taylor, an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey, in a controversial article published this year by the American Society of Nephrology.

The other is that respiratory death is possibly reversible:

...
As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover.

That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

"After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

...

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

This metziut might well have implications for the halachics of organ donation.