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DanArmak comments on When Willpower Attacks - Less Wrong
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Do we know of any actual cases of sleep-deprivation death?
I note that while rats will die of it, mice and pigeons won't; and Randy Gardner went 11 days without sleep, and I can't find anything about any long-term health problems (50 years later, he sounds perfectly hale & healthy in http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/sleeping_in.php - note also he probably could've gone more than 11 days if the descriptions of his press conference at the end as being 'lucid' are to be believed).
Reading about sleep deprivation studies and the 'micro-sleeps' that occur in many species, I wonder if the processes making up sleep might be analogous to garbage collection: you can have 'stop the world' GC schemes, or incremental ones
(The one human example I did find was 'fatal familial insomnia', but I don't think anything can be safely inferred from a rare genetic disease like that.)
I couldn't find any. On the other hand, Wikipedia claims that total and indefinite sleep deprivation is "impossible" to achieve, possibly even under torture, due to microsleep and extreme tiredness enabling brief ordinary sleep in almost any circumstances. Other reported ill effects of SD might be linked to the cause of the sleep deprivation instead.
However, that doesn't answer the question of what might happen to an average human who was sleep-deprived by whatever method, as far as possible, for a really long period of time - months, not days. I expect there would be physiological or mental damage of some kind in (almost) everyone. That doesn't mean there isn't a way to negate those effects and do away with sleep one day - it's just a question of how narrowly we define the "consequences" of sleep deprivation vs. "removable side effects".