Where is doctor kevorkian now

Fiery and unwavering in his cause, Kevorkian made a point of thumbing his nose at lawmakers, prosecutors and judges as he accelerated his campaign through the s, using various methods including carbon monoxide gas. Often, Kevorkian would drop off bodies at hospitals late at night or leave them in motel rooms where the assisted suicides took place.

Kevorkian was imprisoned for eight years. As a condition of his parole in , he promised not to assist in any more suicides. He himself had appealed to leave prison early because of poor health, but said he did not consider himself a candidate for assisted suicide. Kevorkian did not leave the public eye after his exit from prison, giving occasional lectures and in running for Congress unsuccessfully. Born in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Kevorkian taught himself the flute and was a painter.

Well read in philosophy and history, he cited Aristotle, Sir Thomas More and Pliny the Elder in his arguments for why people should have the right to die with dignity. Kevorkian served eight years in prison, but was released early on parole on the condition he would not kill again. Despite that, Kevorkian did not elect to end his own life, according to Nicol, who said doctors used no artificial attempts to keep him alive. The doctor's mantra was "dying is not a crime," and he made national headlines with his invention -- the thanatron, Greek for suicide machine -- which gave patients a "dignified, humane and painless" death.

A pull of the trigger released a drug to induce a deep coma. Once asleep, a timer would inject a lethal dose of potassium chloride to stop the heart. Later, he used a "mercitron," or mercy machine, after his medical license was revoked after the first two deaths and he could no longer get the substances required for the thanatron.

Nicol said he was with Kevorkian just days before his death, visiting him at the hospital. Despite lung problems, "He was filled with hope," said Nicol. For decades, those in the right-to-die movement have eyed Kevorkian with suspicion and disdain. They say the doctor was "death obsessed," and his bizarre antics set back the cause. Caplan and others who support assisted dying with strict guidelines have said Kevorkian was "cavalier and insensitive" to the dying who turned to him.

Caplan said he once asked Kevorkian if he had been aware that one of his victims had a long history of depression. The doctor reputedly responded, "How am I supposed to know the details of her life? They also have said Kevorkian preyed on the mentally ill, who, with further evaluation, could have been helped.

Kevorkian became the face of the assisted suicide movement, which had its roots in the United States in the s and gathered steam in the s. Kevorkian was born in Pontiac, Mich. He was trained as a pathologist and first got his name, Dr.

Levon was smuggled out of Turkey by missionaries in and made his way to Pontiac, Michigan, where he found work at an automobile foundry. Satenig fled the Armenian death march, finding refuge with relatives in Paris, and eventually reuniting with her brother in Pontiac.

Levon and Satenig met through the Armenian community in their city, where they married and began their family. The couple welcomed a daughter, Margaret, in , followed by son Murad -- who later earned the nickname "Jack" by American friends and teachers -- and, finally, third child Flora.

After Levon lost his job at the foundry in the early s, he began making a sizeable living as the owner of his own excavating company -- a difficult feat in Depression-era America. While other families suffered financially, the Kevorkians began living a more comfortable life in a bucolic, multi-cultural suburb in Pontiac. Levon and Satenig were strict and religious parents, who worked hard to make sure their children were obedient Christians.

Jack, however, had trouble reconciling what he believed were conflicting religious ideas. His family regularly attended church, and Jack often railed against the idea of miracles and an all-knowing God in his weekly Sunday school class. If there were a God who could make his son walk on water, Kevorkian insisted, he would also have been able to prevent the Turkish slaughter of his entire extended family. Jack debated the idea of God's existence every week until he realized he would not find an acceptable explanation to his questions, and stopped attending church entirely by the age of The children were also encouraged to perform well in school, and all three demonstrated high academic intelligence -- as the only boy, however, Jack became the focus of Levon and Satenig's high expectations.

Jack rose to the occasion easily; even as a young boy, Kevorkian was a voracious reader and academic who loved the arts, including drawing, painting and piano. But along with Jack's academic prowess came a highly critical mind, and he rarely accepted ideas at face value. He engaged in frequent arguments with his teachers at school, sometimes humiliating them when they couldn't keep up with his sharp debate skills.

While his jabs at teachers earned admiration from his classmates, learning came so effortlessly to Jack that it often alienated him from his peers. Kevorkian was promoted to Eastern Junior High School when he was in the sixth grade, and by the time he was in high school he had taught himself German and Japanese.

Classmates soon labeled him as an eccentric bookworm, and Kevorkian had trouble making friends as a result. He also gave up the idea of romantic relationships, believing them to be an unnecessary diversion from his studies. In , when Kevorkian was only 17, he graduated with honors from Pontiac High School. Accepted into the University of Michigan College of Engineering, Kevorkian had aims to become a civil engineer.

Halfway through his freshman year, however, he became bored with his studies and began focusing on botany and biology. By midyear, he had set his sights on medical school, often taking 20 credit hours in a semester in order to meet the hour medical school requirement.

He graduated in medicine at the University of Michigan in and began a specialty in pathology soon after. In , however, the Korean War abruptly halted Kevorkian's career.

He served 15 months as an Army medical officer in Korea, then finished his service in Colorado. While serving his residency at the University of Michigan hospital in the s, Kevorkian became fascinated by death and the act of dying. He made regular visits to terminally ill patients, photographing their eyes in an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment of death.

Kevorkian believed that doctors could use the information to distinguish death from fainting, shock or coma in order to learn when resuscitation was useless. Not one to avoid distasteful ideas, Kevorkian again caused a stir with colleagues by proposing that death-row prison inmates be used as the subjects of medical experiments while they were still alive. Inspired by research that described medical experiments the ancient Greeks conducted on Egyptian criminals, Kevorkian formulated the idea that similar modern experiments could not only save valuable research dollars, but also provide a glimpse into the anatomy of the criminal mind.

In , he advocated his view in a paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a method he called "terminal human experimentation", he argued that condemned convicts could provide a service to humanity before their execution by volunteering for "painless" medical experiments that would begin while they were conscious, but would end in fatality.

For his unorthodox experiments and strange proposals, Jack Kevorkian's peers gave him the nickname "Dr. Kevorkian's controversial views earned him minor media attention which ultimately resulted in his ejection from the University of Michigan Medical Center. He continued his internship at Pontiac General Hospital instead, where he began another set of controversial experiments. After hearing about a Russian medical team who was transfusing blood from corpses into living patients, Kevorkian enlisted the help of medical technologist Neal Nicol to simulate these same experiments.

The results were highly successful, and Kevorkian believed the procedure could help save lives on the battlefield -- if blood from a bank was unavailable, doctors might use Kevorkian's research to transfuse the blood of a corpse into an injured soldier. Kevorkian pitched his idea to the Pentagon, figuring it could be used in Vietnam, but the doctor was denied a federal grant to continue his research.