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from the pathway-to-freedom-or-fate-worse-than-death? dept.
Surgery to embed a nerve-stimulating implant in a patient in a persistent vegetative state (15 years), resulted in the patient reverting to a "minimally conscious" state.
After lying in a vegetative state for 15 years, a 35-year-old male patient in France appears to have regained minimal consciousness following months of vagus nerve stimulation, researchers report today in Current Biology.
The patient, who suffered severe brain damage in a car crash, had shown no signs of awareness or improvement before. He made no apparent purposeful movements and didn't respond to doctors or family at his bedside. But after researchers surgically implanted a device that stimulates the vagus nerve, quiet areas of his brain began to perk up—as did he.
His eyes turned toward people talking and could follow a moving mirror. He turned his head to follow a speaker moving around his bed. He slowly shook his head when asked. When researchers suddenly drew very close to his face, his eyes widened as if he was surprised or scared. When caregivers played his favorite music, he smiled and shed a tear.
Note that "respond" is on the level of "turning his head when asked, though that took a minute."
A few thoughts on this:
- Medical advances are COOL!
- Hopefully, this advance can help some folks.
- This makes ethical questions concerning patients in persistent vegetative states more urgent:
- (e.g. the question of whether/when to pull the plug has become even more confusing)
- This introduces some new ethical questions:
- Is it ethical to "bring back" someone after 15 years? (the world has changed quite significantly)
- Is it ethical to "bring back" someone to a state where they're might just barely be conscious enough to realise how much their state sucks?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:49PM (6 children)
I am not you, so I can't tell if you have such a strong telepathy to know how it is to be him at this time, but I believe that you are just projecting your own affinities and choices onto him.
There is a catch 22 on that: You can't decide instead of a sentient human that they want the suffering to end.
Perhaps they keep hope of recovery? It is a very individual perk, how much will for survival one has.
You would have to wait for them to be able to tell you if they want to end their lives, and not decide based on how you imagine you would feel, or what would you want if you were in their place.
None of us had been dead, and most (or perhaps even none) of us haven't been locked in or comatose. And even if some of us had been vegetative for a certain period of time, I am sure if they recovered that they are feeling it is a good thing they weren't switched off back then.
The only ethical reason why we should still cut off vegetative people who might slowly and perhaps limitedly recover is to harvest good organs for fully sentient, but healthy organs lacking people, who could then fully function and return the favor to society. Screw those comatose sleepy lazy bags sucking electricity and other necessities for too long! If we start saving all presently "donor cases", we will have to let too many ... normal people die or suffer. Every donor is multi-useful, one cadaver can solve problems for many patients from the transplantation waiting list.
/sarcasm
We should never settle for cadaver transplantation of organs as the permanent solution for organ failure. As medicine advances, we will find ways to save more and more cases which now are primary supply of organs. We shouldn't pit people one against other, to make one's life extension or betterment depend on untimely death of another. We urgently have to find alternative solutions, but unfortunately today transplantations from "mostly dead" are the easiest, most cost-effective path, and that makes research for alternatives (artificial or grown organs) unprofitable, and simultaneously research on brain recovery both "unethical" and lacking in number of cases to research.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 26 2017, @04:30PM (5 children)
We should never settle for cadaver transplantation of organs as the permanent solution for organ failure.
Don't worry, we never will. Transplanted organs (from donors) are not a great solution, as you have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life, which ruin your immune system and make it easy for some disease to kill you early. That's why they've been working on "growing" replacement organs using your own cells; this is one big hopeful application of stem cell research. Hopefully, in the near future, if your liver or heart fails, they'll hook you up to a machine for a little while so they can take your cells, grow a new organ in a week or two, then transplant this organ into your body where it'll be accepted since it's your own cells.
Of course, this is also why we have movies like "The Island", and some other British movie I forget the name of which, starring Keira Knightley with a similar plot but not-so-Hollywood ending. The idea here is that you make clones of people while they're younger, grow the clones to adulthood and keep them around and healthy so that they can be harvested of organs and body parts for the originals as they suffer injuries or age-related problems. This of course all came about as a reaction to cloning, esp. after Dolly the sheep. But there's some obvious problems here: the ethical problem obviously of taking perfectly normal, conscious people and murdering them for their body parts because they're "just a clone" for one. But in addition, there's the practical problem where you need to wait ~20 years before your clone has organs that are mature enough to be used in your adult body. That's OK if you're rich and can afford to have a clone made of yourself that far ahead. But it'll suck if you kill the clone for one vital organ (like the heart), but then a year later now you desperately need her lungs or eyes or even a leg, and it's gone because there wasn't a good and economical way to store the remainder of the clone's body. So modern research is on just growing the organ, with the latest idea I heard being to create a plastic 3D-printed "scaffold" for the organ then growing the body's cells on that. Here's some articles about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_printing [wikipedia.org]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/30/will-3d-printing-solve-the-organ-transplant-shortage [theguardian.com]
There's really no ethical issues here since you're not murdering clone-people, you don't need any cadavers or vegetable-people to take organs from, and you're just using your body's own cells to grow yourself a new organ. It's not here yet, but it certainly looks plausible, and should have some remarkable benefits for our lifespans when it's deployed.
but unfortunately today transplantations from "mostly dead" are the easiest, most cost-effective path, and that makes research for alternatives (artificial or grown organs) unprofitable
Not true. As the articles I cited pointed out, there's plenty of research going into grown organs. Even if there were plenty of donor organs available (which there aren't, not by a long shot), the rejection issues are too great; those anti-rejection drugs are going to shorten your lifespan, so there's absolutely a demand for grown organs because of that alone (but more really because of the very limited supply of donor organs). In addition, donor organs today are worth an absolute fortune, because of their rarity, plus also because of the difficulties in storing and transporting them when they're needed. And worse, they're frequently rejected by the recipient, which means they'll probably end up dying soon, and also the organ is wasted. Grown organs promise to be much, much cheaper and avoid all the problems with donor ones. As a bonus, you get a spiffy, brand-new, pristine organ, instead of one that's decades old and subject to whatever abuses the donor put it through (e.g. drug use, mediocre health, etc.).
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:41PM (2 children)
Never Let Me Go, based on the (predictably better) book of the same title by Kazuo Ishiguro.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:22AM (1 child)
It was a pretty dark and depressing movie, but the one thing I didn't get was why the kids, after finding out there was no legal way to avoid organ-harvesting after investigating some rumor they heard about it, simply gave in and reported to be harvested as ordered. They weren't prisoners; they could drive around as they pleased and lived somewhat independently. They didn't seem to have much of a survival instinct.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Sunday October 01 2017, @02:06AM
Part of it, at least in the novel, was that their "society/culture" was engineered by the powers-that-be to give them a sense of responsibility to each other, e.g. the younger ones cared for the older ones (who had cared for the younger ones as children) who were being actively harvested; also, the hope of being set free if they were "good enough" or "fell in love" kept them from rebelling, as it held out a (nonexistent) reward for not rebelling, similar to the way slaves were kept in check with rumours of occasional freeings coupled with the promise of rewards and punishments in the afterlife.
They were also kept isolated enough from the rest of society that they would appear "different" and thus easier to track down if they did attempt escape.
Mostly, though, I think, it comes from being a postwar British-designed society with postwar British attitudes in a British novel--Stiff Upper Lip, Keep Calm and Carry On, Respect Authority, and all that. Winston and Julia in 1984 could have resisted hard enough to be killed, but didn't.
(Score: 1) by acid andy on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:03PM (1 child)
There's an easy, if even more horrifying, answer to that. One clone made for each possible organ needed. That could of course be multiplied even further if the patron desires more spares. Y'know - just in case! *shudders*
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:15AM
That's an obvious solution of course, but remember the word "economical". Sure, BillG could afford to have a small army of clones like this, but most people won't: having clones is like having slaves: it costs a fair amount of money to house and feed and maintain a human being, especially if you're not getting any free labor out of them. This is why this isn't likely to ever be much of a problem, aside from the ethical problems. This is why there's a lot of research going into 3D-printed organs now; the ethics aren't the big problem, it's the economics. Printing an organ on-demand will be relatively very, very cheap, plus far more convenient.