It was a one-way ticket to Switzerland, then the afterlife. At 4pm on Monday, a 64-year-old American woman with an immune condition lay down inside the Sarco, a sleek, Dutch-designed conveyance that wouldn’t look out of place in an expensive fitness studio or a Tesla showroom, answered a few questions on a screen, then pressed a button that introduced gas into the sealed chamber, ending her life in seconds.
The Sarco, short for sarcophagus, can also be voice-activated, so that physically incapacitated individuals can achieve suicide. Its inventor, a retired Australian physician known as Dr Death for his decades-long place at the vanguard of the right-to-die movement, tweeted on Monday that the (unnamed) American woman “had had an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss