In the early days of organ transplantation from deceased donors (mid-1950s), the surgical team would bring the donor into the operating room with the recipient, the respirator would be stopped, and the team would wait for the donor’s heart to cease beating. This type of organ donation has been defined as donation after cardiac death (DCD), also referred to as non-heart-beating donation (NHBD). These donors were not declared dead using neurological criteria, but rather using conventional cardiorespiratory criteria. In 1959, Mollaret and Goulon coined the term “coma dépassé” (beyond coma) for the patients with an irreversible state of coma and apnea. Jean Morelle and Guy Alexandre of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, were the first to introduce a set of brain death criteria based on the description of coma dépassé, and carried out, in 1963, the first transplants from a brain dead donor in their country and in the world.