New approach encourages patients to record memories and thoughts.

Helping dying patients to relive and record important memories and thoughts may ease the distress many feel at the end of life, according to a new study.

Researchers found that this “dignity” therapy that they used in a study of 100 Canadian and Australian patients increased most patients’ sense of purpose and meaning in life, and eased some of their suffering and depression.

The therapy offers patients the chance to talk about their lives and accomplishments, and to say anything they feel their friends and families should know. The process is recorded and transcribed to be given to a family member or friend.

The flip side of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal — in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."

Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.

"Pleasure, love and grace are not man's to control. They come from identifying with life, and rejoicing in its splendor, vitality, and beauty. Although pleasure, love and grace are ephemeral, trust them and follow them, for they contain the meaning of life." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Arthur W. Wilson sits in his study, breathing oxygen through a nose clip and pausing frequently for the coughs that rack his body.

"I'm not suicidal," he said. "I'm sane."

Mr. Wilson, 86, has been living with the profound pain of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for years. Now he wants to end his life - not today, not tomorrow, but when he chooses - under the provisions of Oregon's Death With Dignity law.

"It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. ...It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it s with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry , snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."

- C S Lewis

That would be a good idea.
- Gandhi (when asked what he thought of western civilisation)

"Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most."
— Thucydides

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
- H.L. Mencken