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...

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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...

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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...

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