This paper analyses the policy issues surrounding the definition of death within the context of technological and social changes. Increasingly precise brain imaging techniques, combined with demographic trends and heightened health budget pressures, are bound to accentuate calls for redefining death in terms of partial- or higher-brain criteria. In addition to questioning our notions of consciousness and of what human life entails, a shift toward higher-brain definitions of death have critical public policy implications, which must be thoroughly debated. Adding patients in a persistent vegetative state or with end stage Alzheimer's disease to the ranks of the dead raises many difficult questions, for instance, must the NHS or insurers fund continuing care for a legally dead but still breathing patient whose family cannot let go? The implications for disposal of breathing patients who lack brain functions deemed essential to life are substantial. The public is likely to find it difficult to accept burial or cremation of breathing human forms or the use of lethal injections to ready the 'dead person' for burial.