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The Doctor Behind the ‘Suicide Pod’ Wants AI to Assist at the End of Life


The death of an American woman inside Philip Nitschke’s latest invention reveals the next frontier in the right-to-die debate.

But in Nitschke’s adopted home country of the Netherlands, the Sarco reflects an ongoing debate about assisted suicide’s place in a medical system that dictates only people facing unbearable suffering or an incurable condition can proceed. After Australia’s Northern Territory became the world’s jurisdiction to legalize the process, Nitschke was preoccupied with the risk people would see him or his colleagues as “some evil doctor delivering lethal injections to a moribund patient who didn’t know what was happening,” he says. A year later, an Australian mother, Mary Waterman, testified in parliament that Nitschke’s book about lethal drug combinations was found on her son’s iPad after he died by suicide.

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