The US had developed a way to identify recipients for donated organs. Some people were not happy with the design of the program. Clive Grawe, a candidate for a kidneys transplant from Los Angeles, told a room full of medical experts that their software was biased against older people. The goal was to maximize the years of life saved by allocating the kidneys. Grawe and other patients argued that this favored younger patients.
It's common to have bias in a computer program. It is less common for the designers of those programs to agree that there is a problem. A less biased way to maximize the number of years saved was found after years of consultation with lay people like Grawe. The majority of donors will no longer be matched only to recipients in the same age group. If they were healthy, some of those kidneys could be used. The committee wouldn't make decisions that everyone would agree with. The process by which it was developed is more difficult to fault.
“I didn’t want to sit there and give the injection. If you want it, you press the button.”
Philip Nitschke
Hard questions are being asked by Nitschke as well.
A former doctor who burned his medical license after a years-long legal dispute with the Australian Medical Board has the distinction of being the first person to legally administer a voluntary lethal injection. In the nine months between July 1996, when the Northern Territory of Australia brought in a law that legalized euthanasia, and March 1997, when Australia's federal government overturned it, Nitschke assisted four of his patients to kill themselves.
The first, a 66-year-old carpenter named Bob Dent, who had suffered from prostrate cancer for five years, explained his decision in an open letter: "If I were to keep a pet animal in the same conditions I am in, I would be prosecuted."
He wanted to back his patients' decisions. He was not comfortable with the role they were trying to get him to play. He made a machine to replace him. He didn't want to give the injection You can press the button to get it.
The machine was a laptop connected to a needle. But it accomplished what it was intended to do. The original device was acquired by the Science Museum in London and is now known as the sarco. The next step would be an assessment of a person's mental health.
There is a chance that hope will be dashed. There is a controversial problem of creating a program that can assess someone's mental health. Doctors don't agree on what it means for a person of sound mind to die. He says you can get different answers from different psychiatrists. There isn't a common ground on which to build an algorithm.
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