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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:57PM   Printer-friendly
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?

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by JNCF on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)

    by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:04PM (#573255) Journal

    For a while, SourceForge was adding closed source adware to projects that left their platform (including GIMP) without approval from the authors or any warning to end-users. They've theoretically stopped, but only after losing all credibility. Not that github should be unconditionally trusted, just that SourceForge is known to be a malicious actor.

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  • (Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:19PM (1 child)

    by darnkitten (1912) on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:19PM (#573514)

    Has anyone reputable certified Sourceforge as clean recently?

    There are several programs from Sourceforge I've kept in a pre-adware state, due to their usefulness. Some of them have updates exclusively available on the site, but while I've heard, like you said, that they've "theoretically stopped" bundling crapware, I haven't heard anyone authoritative say that they are safe.

    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:25PM

      by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:25PM (#574048) Journal

      Has anyone reputable certified Sourceforge as clean recently?

      Not that I know of (haven't checked), but I can't imagine anything that would make me give them an iota of trust anytime soon. Even if somebody demonstrated that everything they distribute exactly matches what the authors intended to publish, my question would be for how long? This sort of self-inflicted reputational damage, not through incompetence but through maliciousness driven by profit motive, should take decades to recover from. Really, SourceForge should just die in a fire. There are multiple alternatives.

      There are several programs from Sourceforge I've kept in a pre-adware state, due to their usefulness. Some of them have updates exclusively available on the site,

      I had a similar conundrum a while back, and ended up installing their shit on a box used for nothing else.