What Could Possibly Go Wrong?:
We tend to think that people with a certain level of severe brain injuries or dysfunction are gone & officially Brain Dead.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?:And though miraculous stories like “Finding Emilie” point to some type of survival even in a “Locked-In” scenario,
Past a certain threshold of function was considered, perhaps for mercy’s sake, the end of the line.
Well, in what just might be some of the most ethically-sketchy experiments not done by world-war totalitarians, a few doctors have decided to test that hypothesis.
And they just got approval…
Here, Hold My Beer Y’All ‘N’ Watch This!:
Drs. Himanshu Bansal, Ira Pastor, and their colleagues at Revita Life Sciences from India and Bioquark from Philadelphia got those permissions from their national review boards to try the more-or-less first “official” experiments on post-death brain regeneration.
The trial will involve about 20 family-approved (because when they initially asked for a show of hands from the volunteers, none were raised. -sorry, black humor for a distressing topic.) subjects at a hospital in India, with each trial taking somewhere around 15 days after the experiments to find any recovered function at all.
Aminos, Shocks, Stem-Cells, AND FRICKIN’ “LAZOR” BEAMS!
These will consist mainly of injecting special nutrients and amino-acid-groups into the inside of their skulls, and perhaps also into the brain-matter too, to attempt to jumpstart them.
Other therapies will include injection of patient stem-cells, low-level red/infrared lasers, and nerve-stimulation techniques that are currently used to revive people in comas.
Dr. Connors’ Favorite Theoretical Basis. If Amphibians Can Do It, Why Not Us?:
Perhaps the one truly interesting note is that similar to cross-species theories you might have seen in “The Amazing Spider-Man”,
Some amphibians and fish have the power to actually regenerate part of their brain after injury, and that forms part of the basis for this experiment.
Obviously however much one side or another wants a result, the ethical line on this is really thin.
High-Strung, Angst-Ridden Motivations On All Sides:
On one side of the coin, you have the individual’s loved-ones who would do anything in their power to try to save the person. -And maybe even “bring them back”, if that were a possibility.
On another side of this, you have doctors and researchers who might be pursuing yet another big, hairy, goal of trying to find one more way to defeat Death. -Whicn anyone who reads HT can relate-to.
A Noble Failure Might Still Bear Fruit:
And in their quest, they might fail temporarily but also discover a whole new set of techniques to help prevent living people who are injured from getting worse.
-Like Ning Zhang’s Super-Healing Brain Gel, UT’s Clever Nerve Hack, and IMB’s 3D-Printed Mini-Brains.
But What Happens When We Get Back Something 1/2-Baked?:
-But some of the consequences could end up being truly Frankensteinian in the scale of their gothic-league horror.
What if someone is only partially revived? What do you do with 1/2 a human? How do you tell this new ~”thing” where, who, or even what it is?
How do you then take responsibility to care for some former shell of a being for the rest of its days?
What Happens When We Get Back A Nonfunctional 40-Year-Old Baby?:
Ok Luckily for all of us, Andy Richter has found permanent work and a forever home on the Conan O’Brien show,
But what if the person’s brain is rendered completely functional again, from brain-stem right up to PFC?
-And the character, memory and life-knowledge-base are all gone and you’re dealing with a living-breathing completely blank slate who knows noone and nothing, including its loved-ones or even, -itself?
Who pays for the potential decades of care & re-education of that indigent?
And Finally What Happens When We Get Back The Monster?:
Or on a more Hugo Strange/Victor Frankenstein level, what if the thing that comes back is an uncontrollable violent criminal monster?
Who’s responsible for it then?
So as much as these doctors seem to have completely dropped-the-mic on the basic human ethics even a dark-ages barbarian would understand, I guess we have to hope that they will fail gallantly, but still bring back some type of Golden Fleece with them anyway.
It Will Probably Get Worse Before It Gets Better:
Because even though the journey will be gruesome, there may only be 1 way to find out if the Seat of The Self is actually rebootable.
I’m thinking though that it won’t be.
Though the researchers note the body can still live and function after brain-death. It just seems that full individual character will be lost permanently, just like the magic blue smoke that tells you when your electronics have just fried.
And the basement at Indian Hill will probably look like a super sweet 16 party compared to the first thing that’s successfully revived from brain death.
So, Question: What do you think about the ethics of it?
JUMP BONUS!: “Who Am I?”, by The School Of Life
Photo/Video Credits:
“The Lazarus Effect” publicity poster & trailer video, by David Gelb, Jason Blum, Jimmy Miller, Cody Zwieg, Luke Dawson, Jeremy Slater, Blumhouse Productions, & Relativity Media
“Who Am I”, by YouTube user, The School Of Life
Links:
• Source: PRWeb
• via: The Conversation
• More Coverage: Telegraph UK | Singularityweblog | Reanima Tech
• Source Trial: CT-Non-randomized, Open-labeled, Interventional, Single Group, Proof of Concept Study With Multi-modality Approach in Cases of Brain Death Due to Traumatic Brain Injury Having Diffuse Axonal Injury
Leave a Reply