Sharon Begley has a fascinating article in her Science Journal column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, subscription required): "There May Be More To a Vegetative State Than Science Thought". Begley’s article discusses a report in the current issue of Science magazine describing a 23-year-old accident victim who suffered a severe brain injury. The woman fell into a coma and eventually "fit the medical criteria for being in a ‘vegetative state.’"
But tests of the woman’s brain activity show results quite unlike what is considered normal for people in such a state. The young woman’s "brain activity [is] consistent with conscious awareness." Begley goes on: "Although the woman fits the diagnosis of being in a vegetative state, her brain activity raises the intriguing (or disturbing) possibility that there is a fully conscious being locked in that unresponsive body after all."
But what I find most interesting about this article is not the woman herself or even what it might say about at least some people in comas. What is most interesting is what this says about what we "know" about things.
Before this study, medical science had some pretty clear ideas about people in comas or vegetative states. Now, it appears, we may not be so sure.
When I was growing up, only Saturn had rings. Now we know Neptune and Uranus have them, too.
In George Washington’s time drawing blood with leeches was proper medical practice. Now it was considered barbaric. I fully expect physicians in the future will someday consider our chemotherapy treatments as primitive as doctors today think of leeches.
The point is how often what we "know," what science "knows," turns out to be wrong. This is not a result of prejudice or deliberate misleading. These are honest mistakes, made by people doing their best.
But even though they are doing their best or trying their hardest, what they think they know as fact turns out to be wrong. We need to remember this when people talk about what experts "know," and we need to approach "facts" with a caution coming from an understanding that much of what we "know" is merely today’s best wrong guess.
[Update 9/9/06, 6:45 p.m. An article in the Chicago Tribune on the report in Science can be found here.]
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