He has been nicknamed "Dr Death" by opponents and, on the face of it, those who accuse him of infanticide aren't wrong; Dutch paediatrician Eduard Verhagen has admitted to killing four babies in the past four years, by administering lethal injections. While Verhagen's actions were technically illegal under Dutch law, he hasn't been prosecuted for them. Indeed, his guidelines for newborn euthanasia, known as the Groningen protocol, were accepted by the Dutch parliament last year.
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Dr Eduard Verhagen
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The trouble is that this comfortable certainty starts to fall apart when you look at actual case studies.
About 7.5 percent of live babies are born with some sort of congenital disorder. While most of these are relatively minor, a few are fatal, untreatable and leave the infant in constant pain. In the Netherlands, Dr Verhagen estimates that these cases, mostly chromosomal abnormalities and severe spina bifida amount to a total of 15 a year. And, as he explains, it is in these cases where most countries lack clear guidelines for doctors:
The parents can often come to terms with the idea that their child is very sick and will die. What they cannot come to terms with is the idea that it will suffer constant pain until that point.
There are courses of action. For example, when an infant is born with anencephaly, where most of its brain is missing, the option is usual taken to withdraw treatment that would keep it alive. When the baby can breathe on its own, feeding tubes can be removed and the infant dies of dehydration. Not ideal, not (in my opinion) civilised, but not euthanasia because life is not being cut short by an active step.
Verhagen argues that newborn euthanasia is still happening outside the Netherlands, it is just done in secret, meaning that it is unregulated and that the doctor risks a possible jail sentence for murder. As an undergraduate, one of my professors admitted as much. We were discussing a case where the child was born with its brain and spinal chord deformed and exposed. "In the old days it was much easier," he said. "You'd just take it off to a quiet room and put a pillow over its head."
The Groningen protocol acknowledges that sometimes death is the most humane course of action and that by bringing it out into the open, it can be properly regulated. Dr Verhagen felt strongly enough to speak out on this incredibly sensitive subject.
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To hear his views on the subject, listen to this week's Research File.
If you happen to be in tropical climes you may start to see large plastic pyramids popping up in the next few years. And while these things are unlikely to win any prizes for beauty, they have just won their inventor, Dutch Engineer Martijn Nitzsche, a World Bank Prize for innovation.
The pyramids are a new design in water purification and can turn the most brackish or salty water into clean safe drinking water. Although you need water to start with - you cannot create water out of nothing- one major problem in developing countries is that the water supply is a soup of bacteria and that the choice often comes down to swamp water or no water.
The water pyramid uses solar energy; first to inflate this big plastic tent so that it keeps its shape, then, once a shallow layer of water is put at the base of the pyramid, the sun's rays evaporate the water, which separated it from the dirt. The pure water condenses on the inside of the pyramid and is collected and run off into storage tanks. The outside of the pyramid can also act as a giant umbrella, to catch rainwater during the rainy seasons.
The technology behind solar stills is nothing revolutionary, but since the design uses air as a means of structural support, rather than poles and sticks, the stills can be made much larger and they don't have engineering weak points.
In fact, the simplicity is part of the design - these things need to be maintained by locals, who are less likely to have an engineering degree or to be able to get their hands on spare parts. So if these pyramids are cheap to build and cheap to run, where and how is Martijn going to make his millions? He grins, "I'll just have to sell millions of them."
To check out the water pyramid, go to: http://www.aaws.nl/home.htm
The Netherlands Academic Year prize is announced on Thursday 1st June. 14 groups from Universities around the country have battled it out for the 100,000 Euro prize.
One of the groups, led by Professor Karin Bijsterveld from the University of Maastricht, has been looking into the history of the tape recorder. So far, so obscurely academic. But their research so far has shed some light on a little known group, the Sound Hunters who, as their name suggests, prowled the country in the fifties and sixties, capturing unusual sounds on the very latest in technology, the reel-to-reel tape recorder.
The story goes that when this new innovation was released, companies were unsure how to market the machines. They had to guess how people might use them and the instruction manuals suggest that they should record an audio album, in the same way that people used photography for visual family portraits.
However, as collectors will be aware, it is the rarities that cause excitement. A high-speed train was deemed far more exciting than the noises of domestic life. The sounds that were valued also speak volumes about the culture at the time of recording. For example, the sound hunters of the fifties prized industrial noises, which, post WW2 were seen as a sign of economic health. However, by the end of the sixties, these same noises were seen as oppressive and polluting.
Sound Hunting died out as people tended to use their tape recorders for listening to music rather than recording effects. But Sound Hunters aren't a lost tribe from the past. The hobby is undergoing resurgence in popularity, thanks to the practice of sampling sound in music. Jan Smeets, one of the students involved with the project, agrees that for DJs today, there is kudos attached to recording your own sound effects for sampling.
Professor Bijsterveld's team of students are keen, as part of the on-going research, to interview past sound hunters or those who had a tape recorder in their home. There is even the opportunity to find out what is on those old tapes in the attic, as the team can transfer these to a listenable format
For more information, visit their website or go to the Netherlands Academic Year prize.
Tags: newborn euthanasia, pyramids, sound hunters, water purification