ARTHUR CAPLAN

The time to talk about it in schools and churches and magazines and debate societies is now. If you wait, five years from now the gene doctor will be hanging out the MAKE A SMARTER BABY sign down the street.

All these remarkable new technologies are starting to make people very uncomfortable with the whole process of science.

Renegade scientists and totalitarian loonies are not the folks most likely to abuse genetic engineering. You and I are--not because we are bad but because we want to do good. In a world dominated by competition, parents understandably want to give their kids every advantage. ... The most likely way for eugenics to enter into our lives is through the front door as nervous parents ... will fall over one another to be first to give Junior a better set of genes.

Do good in the name of children. Do good in the name of public health.

[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.

The old ethic for medicine [regarding new drugs] used to be: Is it safe and what are the risks? That is no longer adequate. Now people ask, "What goal are we reaching for?

The Human Genome Project alone is the Full Employment Act for bioethicists.

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.

The more you start prohibiting donors, the more you are going to have less blood in the supply. It's still not clear you can get it from blood transfusions.

People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak.

All these remarkable new technologies are starting to make people very uncomfortable with the whole process of science.

The old ethic for medicine [regarding new drugs] used to be: Is it safe and what are the risks? That is no longer adequate. Now people ask, "What goal are we reaching for?

The time to talk about it in schools and churches and magazines and debate societies is now. If you wait, five years from now the gene doctor will be hanging out the MAKE A SMARTER BABY sign down the street.

Renegade scientists and totalitarian loonies are not the folks most likely to abuse genetic engineering. You and I are--not because we are bad but because we want to do good. In a world dominated by competition, parents understandably want to give their kids every advantage. ... The most likely way for eugenics to enter into our lives is through the front door as nervous parents ... will fall over one another to be first to give Junior a better set of genes.

People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak.

The Human Genome Project alone is the Full Employment Act for bioethicists.

[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.

Do good in the name of children. Do good in the name of public health.

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.

The more you start prohibiting donors, the more you are going to have less blood in the supply. It's still not clear you can get it from blood transfusions.