Narrator: This is Science Today. Are you prepared for the end of life? Sharon Kaufman, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco has made it her work to better prepare people - young and old, healthy or sick - for what can happen at the end of life and explain how the medical systems are organized around these events.

Kaufman: I wanted to provide a map about what happens to patients and the different roads they can travel - showing both the health professions as well as the public, the details of what unfolds when people get to the hospital; the kinds of decision points where things must be done or must be decided.

Narrator: So, what's Kaufman's advice?

Kaufman: Talk with your families and close friends about how they see the end of their life and to understand that unless somebody intervenes, medicine will do everything it can to prolong life, which could be at an advanced age, prolonging dying instead.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.