Bruce Lehman Quotes

Human cloning and attempts at creating animal-human hybrids are immoral and unethical practices that devalue human life and have questionable, if any, scientific merit. These practices are a direct affront to the sanctity of human life in this state, and have no place in our society.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Even if every gene in the human body were cloned it would be impossible to reconstitute a human being …. To find a substance freely occurring in nature is mere discovery, and is therefore unpatentable. However, if a substance has first to be isolated from its surroundings and a process for obtaining it is developed, that process is patentable

Banning human cloning reflects our humanity. It is the right thing to do. Creating a child through this new method calls into question our most fundamental beliefs. It has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society. At its worst, it could lead to misguided and malevolent attempts to select certain traits, even to create certain kind of children -- to make our children objects rather than cherished individuals.

Bush reiterated his stand to conservatives opposing his decision on stem cell research. He said today he believes life begins at conception and ends at execution.

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.

Bioethics is a very, very important field. As we get more and more in the arena of understanding science and getting better opportunities, the fact that you can do things with biological sciences that have an impact on a human being means you must have ethical standards.

'V-Wars' is a head-on collision of real-world science, terrorism, special forces action, ethics, politics and an exploration of what defines us as human.

Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.

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?

Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable.

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

While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner.

The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments… it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalist will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.

Creating a child by cloning at this time is a moral outrage …

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.

In some countries the effort to debate and legislate the social and ethical implications of the new biological and genetic technologies often precedes their application. This observation confirms the realization by the public that biotechnological applications will interfere with all the basic and profound value systems considered by every human being

This is a matter far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities. The belief that surrogate mothers and clonal babies are inevitable because science always moves forward, an attitude expressed to me recently by a scientific colleague, represents a form of laissez-faire nonsense dismally reminiscent of the creed that American business, if left to itself, will solve everybody's problems. Just as the success of a corporate body in making money need not set the human condition ahead, neither does every scientific advance automatically make our lives more 'meaningful.' No doubt the person whose experimental skill will eventually bring forth a clonal baby will be given wide notoriety. But the child who grows up knowing that the world wants another Picasso may view his creator in a different light.

There's always been trying at some stage to design people. And it will always be presented initially as a positive thing, as a way to weed out diseases. Of course you know it ultimately will be used in a bad way too, to create slaves or servants.

Abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, for example, risk reducing the human person to a mere object: life and death to order, as it were!

I strongly oppose cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience. And while we must devote enormous energy to conquering disease, it is equally important that we pay attention to the moral concerns raised by the new frontier of human embryo stem cell research. Even the most noble ends do not justify any means.

Compassion and justice are companions, not choices.

If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.