Dr Rodney Syme, a urological surgeon, has been campaigning for many years to have the law changed to recognise the right of terminally ill people to have the knowledge and means to choose the manner and timing of their death. This is Dr Syme: Through this newspaper, he has openly admitted breaking the law many times by helping such people end their lives by giving them the drug nembutal.

The Age has long supported physician-assisted death, under rigorously regulated circumstances, for terminally ill people suffering intolerably. Late last year, we ran a comprehensive campaign - with editorials, articles, commentary, community input and videos - over an entire week. You can find that here.

Last month, we again called in an editorial for the right to physician-assisted death to be enacted.

Yesterday, Dr Syme was to have delivered a keynote speech at the annual conference of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Only a matter of days before the event, he was `uninvited' by the college - in effect, Dr Syme was censored. Below is an edited version of his speech on dying - and, in particular, on ``the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of palliative care" - that was, in effect, censored.

``Although I am nearly 80 years old and retired from surgery, I am still practising medicine. For over 25 years I have been counselling people about their end of life concerns. Those conversations are prolonged and open ended. At all times, I endeavour to help people to go as far with their lives as possible. From that experience I have learnt one invaluable lesson – my first self-evident truth – that giving people control over the end of their lives is one of the most valuable palliative tools we have at our disposal.