| Abstrakt: |
What is the Jewish position on organ transplants in general and on heart transplants from deceased donors, artificial hearts, and artificial heart-part implants in particular? Most of the possible answers lack consensus because they deal with multifaceted and interrelated religious, medical, ethical, societal, and philosophical approaches, such as the definition of the moment of death. The very definition of the heart itself is also a subject for discussion. While working on the development of an artificial heart, my team and I encountered a complexity totally unexpected from a medical standpoint. At the beginning of the 1980s the medical community widely believed that developing an artificial heart would be a simple affair, since the heart was considered only as a "pump." We were forced to rewrite the books on hematology, hemodynamics, cardiovascular technology, implantable electronics, cardiac telemetry, the role of coagulation in bacterial infection, and so on. This led to the inference that life is too complex to be explained by random chance, as proposed by evolutionary theory. As a result, 45 percent of my scientific team and I, who had proudly professed to be secular at the start of the program, became instilled with a belief in G-d. We found that science alone cannot explain the totality of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
