BOB ABERNETHY: With this latest Kevorkian case raising fundamental questions of medical, legal, and journalistic ethics, we want to talk with Daniel Callahan. He was, for many years, the president of The Hastings Center in New York, which studies medical ethics. He joins us today from Boston.

Dr. Callahan, welcome. What are the major concerns in all this for you? Start with the event itself, the ethics of what was done.

Dr. DANIEL CALLAHAN (The Hastings Center): I suppose the issue that first came to my mind was that after really helping people to commit suicide, Dr. Kevorkian switched to directly killing them -- killing someone himself. Many of us who followed this debate for years have been worried about precisely that move, that ... assisted suicide is really a kind of way station on the way to euthanasia, and Dr. Kevorkian really fulfilled some of our worst fears about that -- exactly that kind of development.

ABERNETHY: And what do you say to those people who say that when someone is terminally ill, when someone wants to die, that person has a right to assistance or to euthanasia?

Dr. CALLAHAN: I don't believe there is any such right and, interestingly, of course, our Supreme Court says there is no -- there is certainly no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. But right now, suicide is perfectly legal in our country and I think the real difficulty comes when one asks somebody else to do it, particularly asks a physician, because that really begins to implicate that the -- the nature of medicine, the nature of health care and the doctor-patient relationship. And for that reason, I don't think one can see this simply as a matter of individual rights because it -- it really takes place in the social context of medicine.

ABERNETHY: And what's the problem there, the trust that a patient has in the doctor, a doctor's devotion to life? What is it?

Dr. CALLAHAN: It's -- I think the core of the physician resistance on the part -- traditional resistance on the part of medicine to doing this is first of all, the fear that the doctors almost have too much power. They're -- they very effectively know how to end a life and I think, historically, there has been a fear of a misuse of that power. I believe, also, that the patients have seen physicians as the protectors of life, and thus to begin shifting the role to someone who takes life even in the name of relieving suffering introduces a very fundamental change in the role of the physician.

ABERNETHY: And the patient's or the person's -- the dying person's relationship with his or her family?

Dr. CALLAHAN: Well, that, of course, [it's] that much harder to generalize there, we have not had any clear traditions on that particular issue. The difficulty, of course, in many cases is that families are often not very happy to put up with the emotional and physical burden of caring for others. There's certainly the possibility of pressure there. There's certainly the possibility of a kind of happy sense of relief that someone may not be a burden with them anymore. But one way or the other, I think that what we know -- certainly about suicide is that suicides always affect families not only at the moment, but they affect them -- the families down through time by memory of the event. And I suspect this would also certainly be true with euthanasia as well.