Two things:
The 43-year-old woman has been in a deep coma for ten days, has encephalitis and cannot breath on her own. Keep that in mind the next time some anti-vaxxer moron tells you that measles is just some harmless childhood disease.
It is believed that the woman was vaccinated as a child. The vaccine is about 93% effective, and that should have been perfectly sufficient if we lived in a world where everyone was vaccinated: soon, like smallpox, there’d be nowhere left for the virus to hang out and soon, like smallpox, it would disappear into the pages of medical history books. Instead, anti-vaxers have given the disease fertile new ground to not only continue in, but to mutate in.
But wait, there’s more:
“Dead” as in “killed and butchered FOUR HOURS earlier;” “some function” as in “no sign of consciousness.” But also noted that some of the drugs used in the treatment inhibit cellular functions of consciousness, so…
Prior to this, true death for warm mammals meant you had maybe four or five minutes before brain death set in and then….thppblt, that’s it, brain’s kaput. After this… well, I bet that even if they did everything they could to bring that four-hour-old brain back to life it’d be a vegetable at best (turning bacon into a vegetable? Heresy!).
Bioethecists are going to go bugnuts over this. There were *no* ethical issues about the studies being done, because there are no ethical concerns about animal welfare and experimentation when the animal is well and truly dead in the first place. This process not only beheaded the pigs, but extracted the brains from the skulls and resulted in the classic Brain In A Jar, ready to be whisked off to Yuggoth. And What If they could actually restore a brain to consciousness, but they had to de-skullinate it first? Bleah.
The true test would be a brain intact in the body… and a human brain at that. Someone, say, dies of a heart attack and it takes an hour to get them to the hospital. Hook up the tubes, flush the system and hit the big red REBOOT button. Will you get Grampa back… or will it be one of those “sometimes, dead is better” things and he comes back as a mindless/soulless ghoul hungry for human flesh? Hell, what would be the religious implications? People have difficulty enough with those who’s hearts stop for a moment but the brain never quite dies, meaning that the person was never truly dead. But someone dies deader’n disco due to getting shot in the heart with a .44 and they’re cold on a slab for a few hours, then they’re brought back? Oh, yeah, people will freak the frak out.
