‘Vegetative’ May Not Mean What We Think It Means

I sincerely hope that this piece of news saves some lives.

According to all the tests, the young woman was deep in a “vegetative state” — completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings. But then a team of scientists decided to do an unprecedented experiment, employing sophisticated technology to try to peer behind the veil of her brain injury for any signs of conscious awareness.

Without any hint that she might have a sense of what was happening, the researchers put the woman in a scanner that detects brain activity and told her that in a few minutes they would say the word “tennis,” signaling her to imagine she was serving, volleying and chasing down balls. When they did, the neurologists were shocked to see her brain “light up” exactly as an uninjured person’s would. It happened again and again. And the doctors got the same result when they repeatedly cued her to picture herself wandering, room to room, through her own home.

As fast as our science moves, I think it’s wise for us to give the benefit of the doubt to people on the edges of what we consider to be life that is worthy of legal protections. It would be a tremendous tragedy for us to look back on the past 50 years and realize that we had killed millions of human beings thanks in large part to our own ignorance (and hubris, but that’s another matter). How could we regard ourselves as civilized knowing that millions of people died because we couldn’t be bothered to extend ourselves the slightest bit to cover them?

That, mainly, was where I stood during the debate of Terri Schaivo’s life. I could not imagine a compelling reason for depriving her of the chance that science would find that spark of life I believed still lived within her. Others could, and their views prevailed. But as today’s article demonstrates, we don’t know nearly as much as we should when we take those critical life and death decisions.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t take those decision. They definitely need to be made. I think, though, that we would be well-advised to make sure that those grey areas extend as far as we reasonably can. Just in case we’re wrong.

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Category: Hey, Mr. Science Guy!