When you ask people how they want to die, the commonest reaction you get is I just want to go out like a light.

I want, you know, I want to go to bed one day, it's perfectly healthy,

I'm just dying the bed just like that. Wouldn't it be wonderful? Fantastic, just, you know, bang,

gone, no, no awareness, no warning. If that's the only thing is if you go back a few hundred years,

that was universally regarded as the most terrible way to die.

Really, everybody agreed that sudden unexpected death was the absolute catastrophe.

Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kitchen.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is a medical ethicist and the author of dying well. Dr. John Wyatt,

welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be here. It's so good to have you on the show. We're going to

talk about the cheery subject of death. You're already excited about it I can tell.

But before we get into that, tell everybody a little bit about your background. Who are you?

How are you where you are? How do you find yourself here talking to us?

Yeah, my background is as a medic. I'm a baby doctor by training and profession. I worked as

a pediatrician and a specialist in the care of newborn babies here in central London,

University College London. And I'm an academic researcher. I was particularly involved in brain

injury and finding new treatments for preventing brain injury in newborn babies.

And then from my work, I got more and more interested in some of the fascinating and

challenging ethical debates that are going on to do with medicine and as the advances in technology.

And so I've now retired from the clinical front line, but I'm still very much involved and engaged

in medical ethics and in technology issues related to technology, including artificial intelligence.

And the new challenges which are coming up down the road. But I'm very interested in dying.

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