Quotes By Leon Kass

The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.

Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument.

In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.

We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.

I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.

Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.

Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.

Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.

Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.

It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.

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.

Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.

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

The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.

Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.

An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.

There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.

If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.