Creating a safer and better functioning system: Lessons to be learned from the Netherlands for an ethical defence of an autonomy-only approach to assisted dying.

The proposal to allow assisted dying for people who are not severely ill reignited the Dutch end-of-life debate when it was submitted in 2016. A key criticism of this proposal is that it is too radical a departure from the safe and well-functioning system the Netherlands already has. The goal of this article is to respond to this criticism and question whether the Dutch system really can be described as safe and well functioning.

The Final Act: An Ethical Analysis of Pia Dijkstra's Euthanasia for a Completed Life.

Amongst other countries, the Netherlands currently allows euthanasia, provided the physician performing the procedure adheres to a strict set of requirements. In 2016, Second Chamber member Pia Dijkstra submitted a law proposal which would also allow euthanasia without the reason necessarily having any medical foundation; euthanasia on the basis of a completed life. The debate on this topic has been ongoing for over two decades, but this law proposal has made the discussion much more immediate and concrete.

Combining Viral Genetics and Statistical Modeling to Improve HIV-1 Time-of-infection Estimation towards Enhanced Vaccine Efficacy Assessment.

Knowledge of the time of HIV-1 infection and the multiplicity of viruses that establish HIV-1 infection is crucial for the in-depth analysis of clinical prevention efficacy trial outcomes. Better estimation methods would improve the ability to characterize immunological and genetic sequence correlates of efficacy within preventive efficacy trials of HIV-1 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. We developed new methods for infection timing and multiplicity estimation using maximum likelihood estimators that shift and scale (calibrate) estimates by fitting true infection times and founder virus multiplicities to a linear regression model with independent variables defined by data on HIV-1 sequences, viral load, diagnostics, and sequence alignment statistics.