As he told Rather, "I think there perhaps are some things which could be done with people who are no longer conscious at all, and will never recover consciousness… It would be ethically justifiable to approach the relatives and to say, ’Look, we want to find out whether certain drugs produce adverse reactions in human beings. Do you have any objections to us doing this test on your relative, ho can no longer suffer from it because he or she can not longer feel anything at all.’"

[This, by the way, is something his soul mate, Jack Kevorkian, has advocated for years.]

Not to belabor the obvious, but if we know anything it’s (a) whether a particular individual will ‘wake up’ is unknowable, and that (b) there is more and more of a push to assume sooner and sooner that they will not ‘wake up.’ Moreover, we can’t possibly know whether the individual would suffer as we’re busily experimenting on them. All we know is that he or she can’t verbalize their agony.