In 1950s Michigan, a young doctor drew blood from fresh corpses and transfused it into living volunteers, pitching the technique to the Pentagon. Decades before the world knew him as Doctor Death, Jack Kevorkian's hyper-utilitarian worldview was already fully formed, viewing the human body as a biological machine whose parts should never be wasted.

Shaped by his Armenian family's survival of genocide, Kevorkian renounced religion at 12 and spent his early career pitching ideas that ethics boards found grotesque. Bypassing the establishment entirely, he built death machines to skirt the law, sparked a national right-to-die debate, then defied that same law on national television and went to prison.

• His generational trauma and the logic that stripped away spiritual romanticism
• Early proposals to experiment on death row inma ...