Vermont has become the fourth US state to legalize euthanasia. Its legislature voted in favor of the controversial law last week. The new legislation allows anyone over the age of 18 with an “incurable and irreversible disease” and a maximum of six months to live to obtain a prescription for lethal drugs.
The bill was signed into law by governor Peter Shumlin on Monday. Vermont’s House passed the bill 75-65, after its passage through the Senate earlier this month.
The new law has had a mixed reception. Bob Ullrich, of Patient Choices Vermont said that “it means peace of mind and comfort to a lot of people… to know every day of your life that it’s there should such an occurrence happen.” Kathryn Tucker of Compassion and Choices told reporters that "support for patients to be empowered and choose aid and dying is growing… I think…
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The Australian winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine is leveraging her discovery to market a test which will help people know their true health status and biological age.
Elizabeth Blackburn won her award, along with two other researchers, for her work on telomeres, pieces of DNA which cap chromosomes and keep cells from ageing too soon. She discovered the telomerase enzyme which repairs the telomeres. Long telomeres are associated with longer life expectancy; short telomeres with shorter life expectancy.
She says that it is impossible to predict how much longer people have to live, but shorter telomeres may indicate bad health. Telomere length is associated with stress, for instance. Doctors could intervene earlier to prevent disease. Dr Blackburn has said that her discovery "sort of translates into a fountain of youth; the number of years of healthy living is related to telomere length. We…
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“Alzheimer’s has been portrayed as the ‘disease of the century’ that is poised to have a near catastrophic impact on the world’s healthcare system as the population ages,” Professor Johnstone said.
“This representation of the disease—along with other often used terms such as ‘living dead’, a ‘funeral that never ends’ and a ‘fate worse than death’—places Alzheimer’s as a soft target in the euthanasia debate because it plays to people’s fears of developing the disease and what it symbolises. It positions Alzheimer’s as something that requires a remedy; that remedy increasingly being pre-emptive…
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A Montana man brain cancer diagnosis shows how difficult it is to determine whether or not a person has a “terminal illness”. Mark Templin was awarded US$59,000 for expenses and emotional stress after his doctor wrongly told him in 2009 that he had only six months to live. “It is difficult to put a price tag on the anguish of a man wrongly convinced of his impending death,” said the judge. “Mr. Templin lived for 148 days … under the mistaken impression that he was dying of metastatic brain cancer.”
One of Templin’s daughters asked the doctor how her father would die and “he explained one of the tumors would grow ‘like cauliflower’ and Templin would die from a brain bleed.”
After that disturbing diagnosis, Mr Templin sold his truck and quit his job. He put his affairs in order and displayed a large sign in his home saying “Do Not Resuscitate”. His family…
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A fierce campaign is being carried out in Australia to strip Chinese doctor Huang Jiefu of his honorary professorship at Sydney University. Dr. Jiefu, who was Vice-minister for Health in China for 12 years, authorized the forced removal of organs from thousands of executed Chinese prisoners. He may have done some himself.
A group of academics, doctors and lawyers this week submitted a petition to the university to revoke the professorship. David Shoebridge, a member of the NSW legislative council and one of the signatories of the petition, stridently condemned Jiefu: “this is a man, who for more than a decade, day in day out, transplanted the livers of executed prisoners, without consent. That would be a crime in Australia.”
Following the highly publicised pre-emptive double mastectomy of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie, it has emerged that a 53-year-old British man has become the first in the world to have a pre-emptive removal of his prostate. He discovered that he had a “faulty” BRCA2 gene which is associated with breast and prostate cancer and asked his surgeon to remove it.
Initially the doctors were reluctant as he appeared to be completely healthy. The operation also entails some risk and has side-effects: infertility and possibly permanent incontinence and sexual dysfunction. However a biopsy did detect some microscopic malignant changes and the doctors went ahead.
The surgeon, Roger Kirby, told the London Sunday Times that even in this case, he would not normally operate.
“But given what we now know about the nature of BRCA2, it was definitely the right thing to do for this patient. A number of these BRCA families have now…
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Last week we reported that researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University had finally cloned human embryos and successfully extracted embryonic stem cells. The study was published in the leading journal Cell and greeted with great jubilation. This was a feat which scientists agreed was possible but was proving unexpectedly difficult. The last time the claim was made, by South Korean Hwang Woo-suk in 2005, it turned out to be a colossal fraud which embarrassed leading journals and dampened enthusiasm for “therapeutic cloning”.
Unfortunately, the most recent paper has also been criticised for image duplication, evoking the nightmarish Hwang scandal. "It's a shame that this important area of research has come under scrutiny once again," Kevin Eggan of Harvard University told ScienceInsider. The researchers say that the duplication was unintentional and that these minor errors will not affect the validity of the results.
Inferno: Robert Langdon is back with a globe-trotting thriller in which the symbologist has to decode clues left in a map of Dante’s masterpiece by a recently-deceased evil genius before one-third of the world perishes. Oops, we are about to give away too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that the master of transmuting highbrow trivia, European travel guides and clunky prose into dollars has framed transhumanism as the most dangerous threat to the future of mankind.
Brown says that transhumanism is a movement to change the destiny of humanity through genetic engineering. In Inferno, the villain is obsessed with over-population and creates a virus which will make one-third of the world’s population infertile, thus reducing the population dramatically in a single generation. From an interview in Timet, it appears that Brown himself believes that the…
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Alder Gross had requested euthanasia on account of diminishing mental and physical capability and an isolated and lonely life. Swiss doctors denied her the treatment, even after she appealed to the Zurich Health Board. Swiss law does not explicitly limit assisted suicide to the terminally ill.
Gross appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. This court ruled that has that "the absence of clear and comprehensive legal guidelines violated the applicant's right to respect for her private life".
It said Switzerland must specify whether its laws are meant to include people not suffering from terminal illnesses and, if so, spell out the conditions under which they can end their lives.
The cliché “bundles of joy” has two meanings in the assisted reproduction industry: babies and cash. Keen businessmen are scrambling to take advantage of this burgeoning area of the health sector.
Virtus has become a behemoth. It owns almost 50 fertility clinics, day hospitals, and laboratories across Victoria, NSW and Queensland. It has also established a low-cost clinic in each state that targets ''a new segment of the market for whom fertility treatments were previously unaffordable''. The company employs over 80 fertility specialists, supported by 650 staff. It performed about one-third of all of Australia’s 39,000 fertility cycles last year. According to Virtus’s prospectus, IVF cycles and other…
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Negative attitudes towards Alzheimer’s disease are undue influence on the euthanasia debate, 
A Montana man brain cancer diagnosis shows how difficult it is to determine whether or not a person has a “terminal illness”. Mark Templin was awarded US$59,000 for expenses and emotional stress after his doctor wrongly told him in 2009 that he had only six months to live. “It is difficult to put a price tag on the anguish of a man wrongly convinced of his impending death,” said the judge. “Mr. Templin lived for 148 days … under the mistaken impression that he was dying of metastatic brain cancer.”
Following the highly publicised pre-emptive double mastectomy of Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie, 
