I do wonder how you get consent from these people.
http://rozeklaw.com/2016/06/02/controversial-study-aims-reanimate-brain-dead/
A new study intends to take 20 brain-dead patients and regenerate their nervous systems.
The study is led by Ira Pastor, chief executive of Philadelphia-based Bioquark. And ever since he announced the study, he told The Washington Post
his email in-box has been flooded with inquiries about the details of
his techniques and religious representatives warning him that his study
violates the very laws of nature.
“Such confusion, hope and fear is not unexpected given the radical
nature of the project. But Pastor explains that any changes due to the
treatments will likely be subtle, at the cellular level at first, and
detectable only by sophisticated blood and spinal fluid testing and MRI
imaging,” the article reads. “Such work, he says, may have more applications for treating traumatic brain injury, mental illnesses, spinal cord issues and Alzheimer’s in the short-term rather than disorders of consciousness.”
Pastor says in the article that no patients will be woken up for the study.
“Brain death is perhaps the least understood state of the human mind.
Most of us — including many scientists — take it for granted that the
condition is absolute and final. Pastor argues
that’s a mistake. He says he believes it is a potentially curable
condition and that given the right combination of stem cells, drugs,
electrical currents, magnetic fields or other stimuli we haven’t thought
of yet the mind may yet have the power to reawaken.”
The idea is controversial for a multitude of reasons, be it
religious, moral, scientific – but one major concern is economical. With
success, it could mean hospitals will be required to keep brain dead
patients on life support indefinitely. And the entire organ-donation
system may come to a halt since it relies heavily of the families of
brain-dead patients.
According to the article, there has not been a single documented case
of a person who met the criteria for brain death and was then revived
in any state.
“At any given time, hundreds of thousands of people in the world are
estimated to be trapped in the little understood place between
consciousness and nothingness,” the article reads. “Some of them are in a
vegetative state that occurs when the part of the brain that controls
thought no longer functions but they sleep, breathe as normal. Others
are in a coma where they cannot be awakened and don’t respond to light,
sound or touch. Those most severely impacted are considered to be brain
dead.”
Research on actual brain dead patients
who are still on life support is rare. The MD Anderson Cancer Center in
Houston published results of a ground-breaking study on brain-dead and
nearly brain-dead patients in 2002 that some believed would set the
stage for further work in this group. The research involved infusing
millions of peptides or strings of amino acids — that scientists
believed may have the potential to block blood vessels feeding tumors —
into the patients and then doing a number of invasive biopsies to see
what happened. The results, published in Nature Medicine, yielded “a
wealth of data,” according to a write up that year in Science magazine.
I would hate to be awoken from a coma (at lest presuming that until such time I really had no conscious thought) it has been hard enough to "recover" from a stroke coma of 6 weeks with the accompanying muscular atrophy, how much wastage would there be in a period of years. And I have not recovered my pre stroke strength, despite a lot of hard work, so I doubt that it would be possible to recover from a year or more of muscular atrophy. They would just be awoken to spend the rest of their lives in a bed or a wheelchair, neither of which would be anyone's choice.
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