DETROIT -- Dr. Jack Kevorkian's fascination with death dates to the 1950s when the trimly built retired pathologist was a young, eager resident in Detroit.
Intrigued with the idea of tracking the exact moment of death through a person's eyes, Kevorkian asked to work nights so he could be on duty when more people died.Colleagues gave him the nickname "Dr. Death" long before Kevorkian -- convicted Friday of second-degree murder in the death of a terminally ill 52-year-old man -- earned that moniker as America's best-known activist for doctor-assisted suicide.
For years, Kevorkian worked to discover ways to find benefits from death. He wrote papers about the research advantages of conducting experiments on consenting death-row prisoners. He experimented with transfusing blood from corpses into live bodies.
But it was not until the death of a 54-year-old woman in June 1990 that Kevorkian catapulted himself into the national spotlight in the right-to-die issue. Using a drug-delivery machine he built himself, Kevorkian helped Janet Adkins, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, kill herself in the back of his rusty Volkswagen van.
The event launched what has become a nearly decade-long battle between Kevorkian's zealous crusade to legalize assisted suicide and Michigan authorities' equally determined efforts to stop him. As of the end of 1998, Kevorkian said he had helped more than 130 people die.
Well-read in philosophy and history, Kevorkian has cited Aristotle, Sir Thomas More and Pliny the Elder in his arguments for why people should have the right of what he calls "patholysis," or freedom from suffering. Ultimately, Kevorkian believes people should be allowed to visit clinics where they could die with dignity if their life is no longer tolerable.
Kevorkian has made a point of thumbing his nose at lawmakers, prosecutors and judges. When state legislators were considering a ban on his actions in 1993, he presided over three deaths in a week, spurring them into making the law effective immediately.
When state regulators issued an order demanding that he stop practicing medicine without a license, Kevorkian went before television cameras and lit the order on fire.
While polls showed a majority supported Kevorkian's positions several years ago, the tide of public opinion has more recently turned against him as his acts have become more outrageous. In June 1998, Kevorkian lost many supporters when he harvested the kidneys of a man he helped commit suicide and offered them for transplant.
Born May 28, 1928, in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Kevorkian was the second of three children. His parents were Armenian immigrants who escaped a genocide by Turks.
In the 1993 biography "Appointment with Dr. Death," friends described the young Jack Kevorkian as one of the smartest people they had ever met. He was a voracious reader and could recite reams of baseball statistics. In high school during World War II, he learned German and Japanese.