 Further contributing to renewed interest in the traditional approach—and warranting a brief digression—is an approach to organ donation that capitalizes on the fact that current American legal standards for death are disjunctive, permitting satisfaction of either the whole-brain standard or the cardiopulmonary standard, whichever applies first, for a declaration of death. This approach to organ donation, called donation after cardiac death (DCD) or non-heart-beating organ donation, was very rare until instituted with much publicity by the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1990s in response to a perception that awaiting a neurological determination of death for (heart-beating, respirator-maintained) organ donors was insufficient to meet the demand for viable organs. In the Pittsburgh program, a respirator-dependent patient who had previously agreed to forgo life supports and donate vital organs is taken to an operating room and disconnected from the respirator, leading predictably to cardiac arrest. Two minutes after cardiac arrest, the patient is declared dead on the basis of the cardiopulmonary standard: “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.” This procedure allows organ procurement to commence very shortly after cardiac arrest, providing relatively fresh organs for transplant. (Organs, of course, would not be viable if medical staff awaited a declaration of total brain failure—which requires confirmatory tests hours after initial tests—in the patients in question, who will not incur total brain failure unless respirator support is discontinued.)