Quotes About Bioethics

In America, we are selling fetal tissue to be used in: the manufacture of cosmetics as well as for medical research.

Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University advocates the killing of disabled newborns. Reports the New York Times, "To Singer, a newborn has no greater right to life than any other being of comparable rationality and capacity for emotion, including pigs, cows and dogs."6 This is evil. Equating newborn humans with animals is absolutely sickening. But that is what Singer is teaching in his course at Princeton.

I would not want to see any relaxation of the law prohibiting human cloning.

No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning.

What is fetus farming? Simply put, it is the creation and development of a human fetus for the purposes of later killing it for research or for harvesting its organs.

Altogether at least sixty thousand people were sterilized because of Laughlin's efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.

I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

While we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means.

Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.

I think the ethics and morals of genetic engineering are very complicated. It intrigues me.

Bioethics is a very, very important field. As we get more and more in the arena of understanding science and getting better opportunities, the fact that you can do things with biological sciences that have an impact on a human being means you must have ethical standards.

That sort of calculus is easy enough if the potential good is to unidentified people. It's easy to dismiss a faceless abstraction. It's much harder to look a real person in the eye and say: 'For my belief in the inviolability of the eight-cell embryo you must die.' That's often what the 'saviour sibling' cases boil down to.

In fact, many nations currently refuse to support embryonic stem cell research of any kind.

The term "bioethics" was coined by Van Rensselaer Potter, who used it to describe his proposal that we need an ethic that can incorporate our obligations, not just to other humans, but to the biosphere as a whole.

There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.

I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.

There is another use of the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics. Fletcher compiled a list of what he called 'Indicators of Humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication and curiosity.

Suomi had, over three decades and with funding from the NIH, deprived hundreds of infant monkeys of contact with their mothers, isolated them in small metal cages, and deliberately caused them to suffer anxiety, depression, diarrhea, hair loss, and to engage in forms of self-mutilation such as biting themselves and pulling out their own hair—social, emotional, and physical harm that lasted through their lives.

Is it true that there is no morally significant dividing line between fertilized egg and child? Those commonly suggested are: birth, viability, quickening and the onset of consciousness.

Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.

Is it more ethical to edit embryos or to screen a lot of embryos and throw them away? I don't know the answer.

whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't