What does a 'right' to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) legally entail?

"What Does a Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) Legally entail?" Much of the bioethics literature focuses on the morality of PAS but ignores the legal implications of the conclusions thereby wrought. Specifically, what does a legal right to PAS entail both on the part of the physician and the patient? I argue that we must begin by distinguishing a right to PAS qua "external" to a particular physician-patient relationship from a right to PAS qua "internal" to a particular physician-patient relationship. The former constitutes a negative claim right in rem that prohibits outside interference with the exercise of a right to PAS while the latter can provide the patient with a positive claim right in personam to obligatory assistance from his physician. Importantly, I argue that the creation of such a patient right, however, originates with the physician who may exercise an unqualified right of first refusal prior to promising to help her patient commit suicide. In doing so, I hope to establish that explicit physician promises of assistance in dying should become legally binding. As such, current PAS law in both The Netherlands and Oregon is in need of substantive modification.

Differences in the late components of the event-related potential due to age and to semantic and non-semantic tasks.

Recent work in event-related potentials (ERPs) has revealed differences between ERPs elicited during the performance of semantic and nonsemantic tasks. This experiment examined age differences in the late components of the ERP as a function of these tasks. Young and elderly males were presented with 5-word strings on each trial. The subject's task was to decide whether or not the fifth word matched the other four. In one condition, the first 4 words were identical to one another and the fifth word was either the same or different. In the other condition, the first 4 words were different from one another but were drawn from from the same semantic category. The fifth word was either from the category or from a different category. Matches occurred in 15% of the trials and mismatches in 85%. The ERP to the fifth word was analyzed. All ERPs evidenced a late positive component (LPC), the latency of which was greater for the Category task and for mismatches. LPC amplitude was greater in the Identity task. In addition, young subjects' LPC amplitudes were greater for matches than for mismatches, whereas the reverse was true for the elderly. In agreement with previous research, our results indicated that an N400 wave is evident only in response to semantic incongruity and that variables affecting late positive activity seem to be independent of those producing N400. The N400 wave was seen at a greater latency in the elderly. Our results extend previous work (e.g., Kutas and Hillyard 1980) by finding an N400 in a semantic context other than sentences, and in concluding that this component is relatively insensitive to stimulus frequency.

Hidden memory: a rapid method for the study of amnesia using perceptual learning.

Performance on finding hidden figures in a set of picture-puzzles is shown to separate out autobiographical memory and perceptual learning in a group of male neurosurgical patients. Two traumatic amnesics had normal perceptual learning without ability to recognize which pictures they had seen before. The method may be used in the study of transient amnesias of very short duration.

Selecting retrieval cues for early-childhood amnesia: implications for the study of shrinking retrograde amnesia.

A method for selecting semantic cues for early childhood memories is presented. The written records of episodes submitted by the subjects in the study of Crovitz and Harvey (1979) were coded into three-word strings of words in accordance with the gist of the memories. Nouns which described many retrievals (Set A) and nouns which had described few retrievals (Set B) were presented to an independent group of young adults as prompts for early childhood episodes. Prompting with semantic cues gave a fast rate of retrieval, with nouns in Set A cuing early childhood memories more successfully than nouns in Set B. The difference between words in Set A and Set B was found not to be a function of the frequency of usage of these words in the language. Implications for selecting cues to prompt retrieval of memories during the period of shrinking retrograde amnesia are discussed.

Television questionnaire techniques in assessing forgetting in long-term memory.

Two experiments were designed to test methodological assumptions basic to the television questionnaire technique in order to analyze its appropriateness in assessing forgetting in long-term memory. After controlling for confounding variables in the technique as it is presently used, a non-linear function of time period of television program on recognition response to that program's title was found. Reported television viewing habits had a significant effect on recognition score. The relevance of these findings in regard to the quantitative study of retrograde amnesia is discussed.

Problems in the acquisition of imagery mnemonics: three brain-damaged cases.

The literature provides little direction on how to overcome difficulties which some brain-damaged patients have in acquiring imagery mnemonics as a memory aid during the period of anterograde amnesia. For those interested in the therepeutic usefulness of imagery mediation, we provide a detailed account of the acquisition of some mnemonic skill in three brain-damaged patients who initially failed in using visual imagery mediators to recall words lists.

Early childhood amnesia: a quantitative study with implications for the study of retrograde amnesia after brain injury.

Measurement of retrieval of episodic memories ascribed to the various years of early childhood was made over a three-month period of search by 17 normal young adults. The distribution of episodes ascribed to various ages is described, and it is shown that the recovery of memory from early childhood tends to show features of shrinking retrograde amnesia. Methods which were used to recover very early episodes are described, and implications for the study of shrinking retrograde amnesia in brain-damaged patients are discussed.