Agneta Sutton Quotes

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.

Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men?

This [human cloning] is an unethical human experiment on the child to be. It is a major step in the conversion of procreation to manufacture.

UNFIT HUMAN TRAITS Such As Feeblemindedness, Epilepsy, Criminality, Insanity, Alcoholism and Many Others Run In Families And Are Inherited in Exactly The Same Was As Colour In Guinea Pigs. If ALL MARRIAGES WERE EUGENIC, We could BREED OUT Most Of This Unfitness In THREE GENERATIONS.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

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

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war.

If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them.

Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.

Of course it is a very simple matter to identify genes which might modify intelligence or memory and start thinking about whether you want to enhance a human, and the next generation is going to have to deal with that issue. Should we be trying to enhance humans rather than trying to educate them and so on?

We should place priority on the development of safeguards against unwise, permanent alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become principle agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human species.

We have the prospect of intervening in the natural lottery.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a society saying, “It’s all right use embryonic stem cells to save your dying dog, but it’s not okay to use them to save your dying child.”… America’s love affair with animals will slowly but inevitably undermine the religious, moral, and ethical arguments against genome-based therapies for people. Healthier cats and dogs will generate an irresistible demand for healthier children and adults.

Genetic engineering of are own species is not a question of if, but only a question of when….The human race may bifurcate into two subspecies of humans: Enhanced and Unenhanced.

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.

there is no doubt that anyone who had a fair knowledge of the principles of genetics, and who was given control over the matings of human beings, could in the course of a very few generations, produce a large number of very diverse types. He could breed a race of idiots, a race of dwarfs, a race of giants, an albino race, an insane race, a race of moral imbeciles, a race which would almost invariably get drunk in the presence of alcohol, a race of preeminent mental ability, or a race of unusual artistic talent. The task would be easy, as it would involve only the isolation of existing strains of the human species.

The modern movement declares that it is quite worth while to produce a better man, and this is to be done by making him an animal of a finer breed…. What wonders have been accomplished with pigs and cattle; try the same methods, have patience, and you will produce a race of saints and heroes.

Tampering with humanity is pretty scary.

If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

The partisans of eugenic planning hear that other music, the music that says that there shall be nothing random in the world, nothing independent, nothing moved by its own vitality, nothing out of keeping with some idea: even our children must not be our progeny, but our creation.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.