Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die. That turns out to be un-settled science. No human has ever died from lack of sleep. People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep. In a series of controlled experiments, rats and fruit flies did die from lack of sleep. But no one has yet proven that it holds true for vertebrates except for rats. In o…
> No human has ever died from lack of sleep. As far as I understand it, there is a disease that destroys your brain's ability to produce sleep. Once you have it, you suffer total, progressive insomnia and die within roughly 6–18 months. Scientists debate whether it's the underlying brain damage or the sleeplessness itself that causes death, but the two are inseparable in practice, and sleep deprivation is considered…
There is quite literally no prion disease that isn't fatal.
Sleep does a lot of very important things that we probably wouldn't live long without, but it really is unclear to what extent sleep is necessary for them. If we had enough knowledge, could we trigger all the things sleep does without invoking sleep itself ? Perhaps sleep is just a very convenient mechanism.