Support The World's Smartest Network
×

Help the New York Academy of Sciences bring late-breaking scientific information about the COVID-19 pandemic to global audiences. Please make a tax-deductible gift today.

DONATE
This site uses cookies.
Learn more.

×

This website uses cookies. Some of the cookies we use are essential for parts of the website to operate while others offer you a better browsing experience. You give us your permission to use cookies, by continuing to use our website after you have received the cookie notification. To find out more about cookies on this website and how to change your cookie settings, see our Privacy policy and Terms of Use.

We encourage you to learn more about cookies on our site in our Privacy policy and Terms of Use.

Rethinking Mortality

Rethinking Mortality

Remarkable advances in resuscitation medicine—the science of bringing people back to life—have blurred the once clear demarcation between life and death. Led by physicians across the globe, these developments are creating a paradigm shift in our understanding of death, challenging the perception that it is an implacable, terminal moment with the realization that death is a dynamic, biological process that is capable of being reversed.

Today, people who would otherwise be pronounced "dead" are being brought back to life minutes to even hours after taking their last breath, with the possibility of leading healthy and normal lives. Moreover, many of these individuals, spanning all ages and backgrounds, are now reporting—in surprisingly vivid and similar accounts—their firsthand experience of what happened after their cardiac arrest, raising the unavoidable question of the continuity of consciousness beyond physical death.

In light of these striking developments, this four-part series, moderated by Steve Paulson, journalist and Executive Producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," will bring together leading experts at the crossroads of emergency medicine and neuroscience, psychology and law, anthropology and philosophy. They will explore this new frontier at the intersection of life and death, and its potential implications for how we understand and approach our mortality from scientific, ethical, and social perspectives.

About the Moderator

Steve Paulson is the executive producer and an interviewer with To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Peabody Award-winning radio program produced at Wisconsin Public Radio and syndicated nationally by Public Radio International. Paulson has written for Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nautilus and other publications. His radio reports have also been broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. His recent book, Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science, was published by Oxford University Press.

Presented by

Nour Foundation

To the Best of Our Knowledge

Exclusive Media Sponsor


Contact Us

Melinda Miller, PhD

Senior Program Manager, Life Sciences
212.298.8648
mmiller@nyas.org