The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.
The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.
In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.
My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes.
We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.
Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
