THE UNDEAD

The first attempts to bring people back from the dead are slated to start this year.

This controversial plan was thwarted last year in India.

Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based company, announced in late 2016 that they believe brain death is not 'irreversible'. According to the Daily Mail, CEO Ira Pastor has revealed they will soon be testing an unprecedented stem cell method on patients in an unidentified country in Latin America, confirming the details in the next few months. 

To be declared officially dead in the majority of countries, you have to experience complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or 'brain death'.  According to Pastor, Bioquark has developed a series of injections that can reboot the brain - and they plan to try it out on humans this year.

They have no plans to test on animals first. 

Medical science has tight protocols before experimentation can begin on humans. There must be peer review on research, animal trials, then clinical trials. At each stage of the process, the results are published and reviewed by authorities before permission can be granted to proceed. Here, the company is going straight to the end game without any factual foundation. 

HOW BIOQUARK PLAN TO TRY REVERSING BRAIN DEATH:

1) Harvest stem cells from the patient's own blood, and inject this back into their body.

2) Inject peptides into the patient's spinal cord.

3) Fifteen days of laser and median nerve stimulation - while monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

The patient needs to keep oxygen pumping through the body to  keep the brain stem functioning - for example, by keeping a person on a ventilator. It means that most countries today, including the US and the UK, identify death as permanent loss of brain stem function. The researchers are looking to stop families or doctors from pulling the plug on their brain dead patients.

There is no precedent for what researchers plan to do. It may be a very expensive (the article did not say) method with no chance of success (but some families will pay anything in the hope of getting their loved ones back).  So critics and cynics have raised concerns that the company is not going through normal protocols to test their theories before using human beings as test dummies. That is the reason why the medical boards in India stopped the company from doing work in that country.

The ramifications of re-booting a brain dead patient can be severe. What if it only partially works and the patient only has minimum brain activity (such as in a deep coma state with no communication skills). Is that really a quality life? What if it does not activate brain memories, speech, eyesight or senses but merely pain? Then what happens to the patient? What are the unintended consequences of playing god?

It seems LOST also played fast and loose with medical ethics on the island. It used mind control and chemical weapons experimentation which hit its evil zenith after Ben's coup.  The concept of immortality by regular brain reanimations is in the realm of science fiction. But there appears to be some researchers who dare to try it in real life.