“Our society regularly looks to technology to solve perennial human problems. Such problems as suffering and death are ones that we cannot solve, however; we can only cope with them.”

—Caroline Whitbeck

A February 1997 Los Angeles Times article tells the story of a ten-year old girl whose death from a malignant brain tumor became the center of a bioethical controversy over how to define death and when to end life-prolonging medical treatment. The doctors who first diagnosed the tumor immediately concluded that it was terminal. They decided that it was futile to operate on the girl since the cancer would inevitably grow and spread, and they advised the girl’s family that the only useful medical treatment would be painkillers to keep her as comfortable as possible while she died. But the girl’s parents, who believed that it was not their daughter...