An interesting but sad story from Wired Magazine:
Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?
The Wired headline is overly dramatic, but the article fortunately is more respectful, and the addition of links to actual newsgroup postings adds a sadly poignant touch.
"He said GAC would make him immortal."
McKinstry meant that part about immortality literally. "The only difference between you and me is the same as the difference between any two MP3s — bits," he wrote in an Amazon.com review of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (He gave the book three stars.) McKinstry often told friends that he intended to upload his consciousness into a machine: He would never die.
...on January 23, after calls from panicked friends, the police checked McKinstry's apartment and found his body. He had unhooked the gas line from his stove and connected it to a bag sealed around his head. He was dead at age 38.
...
Four weeks after Chris McKinstry committed suicide, the police were dispatched to an apartment at 1010 Massachusetts Avenue near MIT. Inside, they found the 33-year-old Singh. He had connected a hose from a tank of helium gas to a bag taped around his head. Mahender Singh still has the robot that his son created in high school. "He thought that computers should think as you and I think," he says. "He thought it would change the world. I was so proud of him, and now I don't know what to do without him. His mother cries every day."