More fiddling with the definition of death?

Stanley contends that G.R. Gillett, in the last paragraph of an otherwise excellent article, "Why let people die?" (Journal of Medical Ethics 1986 Jun; 12(2): 83-86), is "fiddling about" with the definition of death when he argues that the patient in a persistent vegetative state is, in an ethical sense, no longer alive as a person; that what remains is a body in which the former patient has no futher interest. Stanley maintains that the determination of the nonreversibility of decortication is uncertain while brain stem death is not reversible. Furthermore, decorticate patients are still biologically alive and decisions concerning their treatment and who makes the decisions are important questions for the medical profession and for society to address. The author concludes that these problems should not be solved by extending the definition of death to include neocortical death.