Word: function
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...approaches there is less and less life in the individual, that there is present quantitative factor, a sort of death by inches. To a certain point this is supportable in that all organ and never centers do not become irreversibly damaged simultaneously: consciousness as a brain function is often irretrievably destroyed months to years before the respiratory and vasomotor centers fail. At the same time one can share Schreiner's (1966, p. 100) disconent and insist that "a coordinating vital principle exists which is either there or not there." This vital principle comes into being when the sperm fertilizes...
...executive performance. He has not built a genuine "Johnson team." Curiously, more first-rank Kennedy men have stuck it out with him than have the men whom he himself brought into the Government, notably Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, George Reedy. Johnson, moreover, has failed to perform the crucial executive function of charting a clear course for the future. One top economist complains that Johnson's close-to-the-vest method of operation, perfected during 24 years in Congress, has left major institutions stumbling around in the dark on vital policy decisions until the last possible moment...
When did Denise Darvall die? Explains Dr. Marius Barnard, 40, younger brother of Christiaan and his right-hand assistant during surgery: "I know in some places they consider the patient dead when the electroencephalogram shows no more brain function. We are on the conservative side, and consider a patient dead when the heart is no longer working, the lungs are no longer working, and there are no longer any complexes...
...been apostrophized as the throne of the soul, the seat of man's noblest qualities and emotions-as it still is in poetry and love songs. But even the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano noted last week that "the heart is a physiological organ and its function is purely mechanical." In fact, the heart is nothing more than a pump. There is no more soul or personality in a heart than in a slice of calf's liver...
...score the ancients were right. The heart is essential to life in a more immediate, temporal sense than any other organ, even the brain. The human body can survive for years in a coma, with no conscious brain function -but only for minutes without a beating heart. So the presence of a heartbeat, along with breathing, has long been the basic criterion for distinguishing life from death. It still is, in the vast majority of cases, despite some special situations in which the brain's electrical activity is a more reliable index. (So far, no surgeon has seriously considered...