Kevorkian Urged Death Research, Report Says

Jack Kevorkian, the leading U.S. proponent of doctor-assisted suicide, has long had a fascination with death and medical research on the dying, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday.

The magazine said it had obtained scientific articles by Kevorkian in which he called for advancing “knowledge about the essence of human death” through “research on living human bodies.”

For example, Newsweek said, in 1958 Kevorkian presented a paper to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in which he proposed allowing condemned convicts to volunteer for “painless” medical experiments that would begin while they were alive and eventually be fatal.

In a 1960 pamphlet titled “Medical Research and the Death Penalty,” the magazine said, Kevorkian said experiments on humans could provide far greater benefits than those on animals and that killing condemned convicts without experimenting on them was a waste of healthy bodies.

In the same pamphlet, Newsweek said, Kevorkian suggested offering an additional period of grace to men on Death Row who claim innocence. They could be kept alive but unconscious for weeks while experiments were conducted on them.

“If the experiment was not excessively mutilating . . . the subject could conceivably be revived if evidence of innocence was uncovered,” he said.

Two decades later, Kevorkian again advocated experiments on convicted criminals in an obscure German journal, Medicine and Law, Newsweek said. He suggested including anyone facing imminent death such as “all brain-dead, comatose, mentally incompetent or otherwise completely uncommunicative individuals.”

Newsweek said Kevorkian maintained in a 1986 article that Nazi experiments on human beings were “not absolutely negative.”

On Sunday, police ejected Kevorkian and guests from his Royal Oak, Mich., apartment while they searched it, Kevorkian said. Kevorkian said the guests included his sister, a supporter and the supporter’s fiance.

Police said they would not comment until today.