N.Z. scientist avoids jail for helping mother die

A New Zealand scientist was sentenced to home detention Thursday for helping his terminally ill mother to die in an act a judge said was motivated by "compassion and love", rather than personal gain.

Sean Davison, a South African-based forensic specialist, admitted helping his 85-year-old mother Patricia commit suicide in the South Island city of Dunedin in 2006 by giving her a drink laced with crushed morphine tablets.

He originally faced up to 14 years' jail when he was put on trial for attempted murder in the High Court last month but agreed to plead guilty after prosecutors downgraded the charge to "counselling and procuring suicide".

High Court judge Christine French sentenced Davison to five months' home detention, saying the 50-year-old knew he was committing a crime in helping his mother die but the offence was "at the lower end of the scale".

"Although in my view there was significant premeditation, you acted out of compassion and love and not for any personal gain," French said.

Davison's mother had refused to eat in the weeks leading up to her death, hoping to speed up her demise, and French said she had remained strong-willed to the last, pressuring her son to end her life.

Outside the court, Davison said his case should never have been prosecuted and called for legal changes to allow voluntary euthanasia.

"This trial was not about justice, it was about getting a conviction at all costs," he told reporters. "I feel the law should be about humanity."

Davison was arrested in September 2010 but, in an unusual move, he was granted bail, allowing him to return to South Africa after he pledged to return to Dunedin for his trial, partially on the strength of a character reference from Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"I feel that the case of Dr. Sean Davison is an exceptional and tragic one," the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-apartheid activist said.

"In my opinion he is an upright citizen who has made a contribution to society and has much more to offer. I urge the court to show leniency in sentencing."

As part of his work at South Africa's University of the Western Cape, Davison has used DNA testing to identify the remains of activists killed and dumped in anonymous graves by authorities during the apartheid era.

He will serve his home detention sentence in New Zealand before he can travel to South Africa, where he has lived for more than 20 years.

Home detention allows convicted criminals considered low-risk to serve their sentence at an approved residence provided they agree to wear an electronic anklet.

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Learn from Shakespeare, study tells doctors

Doctors should read up on Shakespeare, according to an unusual medical study that says the Bard was exceptionally skilled at spotting psychosomatic symptoms.

Kenneth Heaton, a doctor at the University of Bristol in western England, trawled through all 42 of Shakespeare's major works and 46 genre-matched works by contemporaries.

He found Shakespeare stood out for his ability to link physical symptoms and mental distress.

Vertigo, giddiness or dizziness is expressed by five male characters in the throes of emotional disturbance, in "The Taming of the Shrew", "Romeo and Juliet", "Henry VI Part 1", "Cymbeline", and "Troilus and Cressida".

Eleven instances of breathlessness linked to extreme emotions are found in "Two Gentlemen of Verona", "The Rape of Lucrece", 

"Venus and Adonis" and "Troilus and Cressida".

Grief or distress is conveyed through symptoms of fatigue in "Hamlet", "The Merchant of Venice", "As You Like It", "Richard II" and "Henry IV Part 2".

Disturbed hearing at a time of mental crisis crops up in "King Lear", "Richard II" and "King John".

Meanwhile, coldness and faintness, emblematic of deep shock, occur in "Romeo and Juliet", "Julius Caesar", "Richard III" and elsewhere.

"Shakespeare's perception that numbness and enhanced sensation can have a psychological origin seems not to have been shared by his contemporaries, none of whom included such phenomena in the works examined," Heaton observes.

Shakespeare can help doctors today who face patients whose physical state masks underlying emotional problems, he suggests."Many doctors are reluctant to attribute physical symptoms to emotional disturbance, and this results in delayed diagnosis, 

overinvestigation, and inappropriate treatment," Heaton points out.

"They could learn to be better doctors by studying Shakespeare. This is important because the so-called functional symptoms are the leading cause of general practitioner visits and of referrals to specialists."

The study appears on Wednesday in a British publication, the Journal of Medical Humanities.

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Recipient doing well after first artificial windpipe graft

The word's first artificial windpipe transplant has been such a success that a second operation has been carried out and a third is being planned, The Lancet reported on Thursday.

Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a 36-year-old Eritrean, is doing well after undergoing the ground-breaking operation in Stockholm in June, it said.

Beyene, a post-graduate geology student currently living in Reykjavik, Iceland, had had his trachea removed because of cancer.

It was replaced in a 12-hour operation on June 9 with a synthetic "scaffold" covered with his own stem cells, or precursor cells of windpipe tissue.

"The patient has been doing great for the last four months and has been able to live a normal life," the British journal quoted Tomas Gudbjartsson, a professor at Landspitali University Hospital and University of Iceland in Reykjavik, as saying.

"For the last two months he has been able to focus on his studies and the plan is that he will defend his thesis at the end of this year."

The operation, led by Professor Paolo Macchiarini of Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital, entailed using 3-D imaging to scan Beyene and then building a glass model of the afflicted section of his windpipe.

The glass was used to shape the artificial scaffold, which was then seeded with stemcells.

Macchiarini has just carried out his second transplant, on a 30-year-old man from Maryland, United States, who also had cancer of the trachea. The scaffold was made from nanofibres and thus "represents a further advance," the Journal quoted Macchiarini as saying.

His team is now hoping to treat a 13-month-old South Korean infant with the same technique.

"We will continue to improve the regenerative medicine approaches for transplanting the windpipe and extend it to the lungs, heart, and oesophagus," said Macchiarini.

It marks a step forward in regenerative medicine, as the organ is tailor-made to the patient, he said.

In addition, artificial organs do not require the long waiting time that usually happens in human donation.

As the stem cells come from the patient himself, this reduces risk of attack by the immune system, which is the case for donated organs whose rejection has to be combatted by taking powerful immunosuppressive drugs.

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