Michio Kaku Quotes

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.

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.

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

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?

Individual wishes are driving the possible emergence of eugenics, not the state, because people want children for whom they can be ambitious.

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.

Is it more ethical to edit embryos or to screen a lot of embryos and throw them away? I don't know the answer.

Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.

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.

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.

Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under another name than eugenics.

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.

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

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.

The science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding

The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress.

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.

People have been trying for centuries to manipulate genes, enhance certain traits, and achieve racial purity, even in humans. And of course I thought of the Nazis and their efforts toward Aryan magnificence.

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?

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.

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so-called desirable characteristics.

If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.