It used to be a person was either "alive" or "dead" (a binary state, one or the other but not in between). Modern technology has changed that. There is this device called an "ECMO machine" that can keep a human being suspended between life and death for months. ECMO stands for ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. In essence it is an artificial heart, lung and kidney.

Death does not shutdown all of the organs at once. For example, after cardiac arrest the order of organ death is the kidneys, the brain and then the liver. If a person is put on an ECMO machine after a severe insult to the body, the blood pH starts to go up because of all the tissue necrosis. The hospital staff usually combats this with sodium bicarbonate solution injections. It's actually possible to stabilize a person on an ECMO machine after almost all of the brain has gone necrotic except for the brain stem. Given time, the brain tissue decomposes away and there's nothing left in the skull except spinal fluid and the end of the brain stem. Keeping a person on an ECMO machine is extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per day). At the end of the process, the person might survive with an actual consciousness or more likely become a living corpse. The worse case scenario is for enough of the liver and brain stem to survive such that the person can live off the ECMO machine on dialysis alone (the kidneys are shot). The person's family then has the nightmare and expense of dealing with a living corpse for years or longer.

Yasser Arafat might be on an ECMO machine. Somebody is maybe convinced that Arafat will wake up and tell them where all the stolen Palestinian money. If Arafat is on an ECMO machine, they're probably wasting their time and money.

Gary