Jennifer Doudna Quotes

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

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.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

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.

It's inevitable that we'll have some form of designer children, fueled not just by the science but by parents' hard-wired desire to give their children every advantage.

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

Is it or is it not ethical to create an embryo, and to create a person for the purpose of getting an organ to give to someone else? Your knee-jerk reaction is 'absolutely not;' but you need the ethical analysis of that to show why and how that is something that you need to stay away from.

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

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.

Man has no right to claim the role of the creator of his likes or to choose their genetic prototypes, thus determining their personal characteristics .

We should control fertility clinics so that they do not create spare human beings. They are spare people.

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.

Personally, I don't think it is acceptable to manipulate the human germline for the purpose of changing some genetic traits that will be transmitted over generations.

People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn't pretend we're having an argument about science when we're having an argument about values.

This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby.

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

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

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

There is no way now to get around some use of embryos. But my goal is to avoid using them.

Each year thousands of embryos, no bigger than the head of a pin, are created in the process of in vitro fertilization, with the support of Congress, by the way.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.

I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic cells growing in a petri dish.