That is indeed the case: in this procedure, physicians declare a patient dead prematurely (shortly after heart failure), then deploy interventions to resume circulation in the patient in order to optimize organ viability. But – get this – they deliberately block the circulation of oxygenated blood from reaching the brain.
Ensuring that the brain is deprived of oxygenated blood while other organs are being perfused with it does two things: it preserves organs for transplantation, and it ensures that the patient dies — at the hands of the surgeons, in a manner other than the patient had already been naturally dying.
What happened to the dead donor rule?
This is complicated stuff with all sorts of physiological and philosophical underpinnings and I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself. (I discuss these matters in depth in my recent book, Determining Death by Neurological Criteria). But one can intuitively grasp that this is a troubling development, since the entire organ transplantation enterprise is predicated upon the “dead donor rule” — the stipulation that vital organ donors must in fact be dead.
A silver lining of this kind of news might be that prospective organ donors and the general public will become more aware of the fact that some organ transplantation procedures commence before a donor has actually died. For now, however, this has only seemed to cause a stir among transplant specialists and bioethicists.