Not sure what you were referring to with the medical question you started before she woke up, but here’s some info. Most donated organs come from brain dead patients as seen here, their bodies are kept “plugged in” to machines to keep the heart pumping so oxygen still goes to the organs to keep them viable. These days we even have machines recently developed that we can hook organs up to outside of the body to allow them to even more so remain viable for transplant into a new person. However without such machines, the organs have to immediately go into cold storage, because they’ll rapidly begin to decay. The hours vary depending on the organ of how long they can stay in storage and still be viable for transplant.

About 25 years ago I interviewed the doctors of the INCUCAI (acronym in Spanish for The National Central Institute for Ablation and Implant Coordination) in Buenos Aires Argentina about their procedures and they explained that, at least in Argentina, when an organ donor is declared brain dead, they are put in a respirator to keep the organs oxygenated, and a machine to artificially pump the blood, and they hook up the body to an encephalogram (to measure brain activity) for 8 hours. Only if there is zero brain activity for all the 8 hours they are allowed to, then, harvest the organs.

Assisted death works, some also call it assisted suicide… but generally it’s also referred to as euthanasia…

I am very excited that this episode is now out of the way and I look forward to the 2 last episodes of the season 1 (some of my favorites)

The setup in this one feels to me more like an X-Files episode than a Fringe episode. (2x6 'Earthling' also feels something more like X-Files than Fringe, and in Season 2 there are explicit homages to the fact that X-Files had a strong influence on Fringe.) In every series, I seem to completely forget about some particular episode, and in the Fringe series, this is the episode that I consistently completely forget about. Anyway, this episode is more of a curiosity in the meta sense, given when it aired and how it fits with continuity (which we won't speak any details about, because --spoilers--).

And here it is… some groups were overly upset about this episode… catholics for instance.