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David Goodall: Scientist, 104, begins trip to end his life
On Wednesday, 104-year-old scientist David Goodall bid farewell to his home in Australia to fly across the world to end his life. The lauded ecologist and botanist is not suffering from a serious illness but wishes to bring forward his death. Key to his decision, he says, has been his diminishing independence.
"I greatly regret having reached that age," Dr Goodall said on his birthday last month, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "I'm not happy. I want to die. It's not sad particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented."
Assisted dying was legalised by one Australian state last year following a divisive debate, but eligibility requires a person be terminally ill. It is illegal in other states. Dr Goodall says he will travel to a clinic in Switzerland to voluntarily end his life. However, he says he resents having to leave Australia to do so.
Also at USA Today, CNN, and The Local.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday May 05 2018, @02:54AM
What's the magic entropy reset at birth? How does a single cell grow into a young adult?
Entropy constraints are only relevent in a closed system, and the human body is anything but closed.
The human body is a biochemical machine that works for around a century due to continual and extensive self-repair. The amount of energy and entropy processed during that time dwarfs that required to completely rebuild a body.
The problem is that some of those repairs take short cuts, and leave accumulating errors and damage. e.g. Scar tissue instead of new tissue, unfixed RNA and DNA errors that are merely silenced instead of corrected, unwanted byproducts that don't have a removal mechanism.
The reason is simple, evolution takes a quick and dirty fix over a costly repair every time. It is cheaper and easier to have a cell divide, and have each daughter cell have only half as much rubbish in it, than to clean out the rubbish. Easier to slap some collagen glue over a cut than to correctly rebuild the damaged tissue.
There is no in-principle reason we cannot improve those repair processes to be sufficient for indefinite lifespan.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.