In a case which has attracted world-wide attention, a 104-year-old Australian scientist has boarded a plane which will take him to Switzerland to die at an assisted suicide clinic. Dr David Goodall, a distinguished ecologist who retired in 1979, is frail but not terminally ill. Hence, he is not eligible to move to the Australian state of Victoria to die there under its new euthanasia legislation.
A long-time member of Philip Nitschke’s Exit International organisation, Dr Goodall was able to find support for his request for assisted suicide overseas. A GoFundMe campaign organised by Dr Nitschke raised enough money…
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Baroness Mary Warnock, a distinguished Oxford ethicist, was the chair of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology of the UK Parliament in 1982-1984 – which produced the Warnock Report. Its recommendations eventually became the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which governs human fertility treatment and experimentation using human embryos in the UK.
At 94, she is still going strong. BioNews, of the Progress Educational Trust in London, interviewed her about the impact of the Warnock Report. Here are a few brief excerpts:
The selling point of her controversial recommendations:
Britain’s oldest IVF parents have had their child removed by a government agency after they failed to meet minimum care requirements. The unnamed couple, the mother aged 63 and her partner 65, are “devastated”, according to a report in the London daily The Sun.
“Social services have been dealing with them since last year and told them to make improvements in how the child was being looked after,” The Sun was told. “They then decided that the called-for improvements had not happened and took the child into care.”
Five years ago, a German couple, Karl and Inge, signed an agreement granting permission to an IVF clinic to create embryos with their frozen sperm and eggs. Then came divorce. Then Inge forged Karl’s signature twice to create embryos which resulted in the birth of a son. Then Karl was billed for child support.
Karl, unwilling to support children he had never consented to create, filed a lawsuit to be released from the obligation. He contended that after the separation he had revoked his permission for creating the embryos and that the clinic should assume financial support for the…
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Debate over self-driving cars has intensified in the US following the two driverless vehicle fatalities in March. Some commentators argue that all driverless car tests should be halted until safety concerns are addressed.
Yet there is another question that requires urgent consideration, namely, “what kind of ethics should we program into driverless cars?”. Self-driving cars may face decisions involving a choice between which lives to prioritise in the event of an impending crash. And these decisions require ethical answers.
What does it mean for a human being to “die”? This question is more complex than one might think. In the domain of vital organ procurement, there is significant disagreement about the criteria that we should employ to assess when someone has died.
The standard criterion for several decades has been the “brain death” criterion, according to which a patient can be pronounced dead once “whole brain death” has occurred. Whole brain death refers to the comprehensive and irreversible cessation of brain function, typically caused by trauma, anoxia or tumor.
Scientists from the universities in the Netherlands have successfully created synthetic embryo-like structures from mouse stem cells, raising hopes of new insights into the causes of infertility. The model embryos resemble natural ones to the extent that, for the first time, they implant into the uterus and initiate pregnancy. The research, published this week in Nature, was met with enthusiasm by the scientific community, though some are wary of the idea of creating artificial embryos.
Here’s an excerpt from a Maastricht University press release explaining the new research:
Terminally ill British toddler Alfie Evans has died just a little under one week after having life support withdrawn. The boy's father, Thomas Evans, annouced his passing on Facebook yesterday. "My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings at 02:30", he wrote. "Absolutely heartbroken".
The protracted legal dispute over the boy's fate reached its climax on Monday, with protesters attempting to storm Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in a bid to have the boy released. Footage showed dozens of angry protesters running towards a revolving door at the entrance of the hospital, with police forming a line…
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Only about 15% of euthanasia cases in the semi-autonomous region of Flanders, in Belgium, are being reported, according to the latest research by physicians. It has long been known that euthanasia is underreported on official forms, but this figure – that there are about 550% more cases of euthanasia than are currently making their way into the government statistics -- seems to have astonished even the researchers.
A reconstructive surgery team at Johns Hopkins University has successfully performed the world’s first total penis and scrotum transplant. The patient was a young unnamed military veteran maimed by an IED in Afghanistan. He lost both legs above the knee as well as his genitals.
“That injury, I felt like it banished me from a relationship,” he told the New York Times. “Like, that’s it, you’re done, you’re by yourself for the rest of your life. I struggled with even viewing myself as a man for a long time.”
