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EXPLANATORY PREAMBLE The important techno-scientific advances obtained over the last six decades have permitted the establishment of transplants of organs as optimal treatment alternatives for an ever-increasing number of patients with irreversible organ failures. The possibility of offering these procedures to the patients has required great generosity and altruism on the part of the donors and their relatives. Ever since the fifties in the last century, when the first transplants in human beings were perfomed, the enormous complexity of a bioethical order involved in the carrying-out of the transplants has been made manifest; initially, because of the necessity to establish criteria regarding death and consequently, because of the fact that the practice of transplant medicine incorporated a hitherto unheard-of and extremely complex variable: the organ donor. The questionings of a bioethical order, related to organ transplants, posed in the second half of the twentieth century, have motivated intense debates and have constituted an authentic challenge for the scientific, legal, moral and religious ambits during all these years. It must be recognized that the result of those debates has led, very gradually, to establishing international order in the practice of transplants. The criteria for encephalic death have been clearly defined and for the last 4 decades, have been accepted in an almost universal manner; likewise, it has been possible to define the rules and optimum conditions for the carrying-out of the transplants.

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2013-07-24   |   379 visitas   |   Evalua este artículo 0 valoraciones

Vol. 63 Núm.2. Marzo-Abril 2011 Pags. 187-197 Rev Invest Clin 2011; 63(2-ENGLISH)