Arthur Caplan Quotes
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.
Arthur Caplan, Bioethicist, Interview by Karen Pallarito in The Scientist, January 200
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Kass was appointed for his religious, anti abortion views and he is an excellent proponent of one perspective. There are others who do not necessarily see human cloning in such a dark light. Although, the process has to be developed, at some time it well might be a mode by which infertile people could have children. Kass’s criticisms were made by others when in vitro fertilization techniques were being developed.
This was written over 2 decades before Dolly the sheep was first cloned. Since his call for a societal public discussion about cloning, there has been very little, but by the 21st century there had been just a few hasty, ill-informed, almost hysterical efforts to legislate on the subject.
This is a classic example of a legislator, concerned about the ethics and morality of certain types of scientific experiments, and not understanding the scientific meaning of the terms used, would also make illegal existing and important technologies and cures. In this case, he thinks of cloning as reproducing another exact human being, but we clone human cells every day to produce many of the beneficial medicines we use commonly. And the combination of animals and humans is common in many aspects of modern medicine. For burns the tissue of pigs is used to cover the wound and act as a scaffold on which human skin cells grow. There are millions of people in America and the rest of the world who are leading a normal life with a pig or a cow heart valve. There are ethical problems to be sure but most legislators have little clue as to what they are, and tend to want to outlaw whole areas of science out of their ignorance in in reaction to public pressure from others who do not understand what it is that they want to prohibit.
Critics of her position observe that the same objections could describe the decisions of what we teach children today. There is much disagreement about what should be taught. In the final analysis our society allows the parents to decide. If they want to send a child or a religious school that did not teach mathematics that is their right. If they chose a science school that did not teach music, that too is their right. Genetics may be treated no differently.
This quotation not only illustrates the discomfort of the atomic scientists who developed the atomic bomb regarding the ethics and decision making regarding use, but also how complex a man Teller himself was. Here he sounds like a left-leaning centrist. A little later he would side with the hawks in the military and the political world and slander his colleague Oppenheimer publicly advocating an arms race and the development of the hydrogen bomb when the existing technology of the atom bomb could wipe out Russia or any other nation. His new allies however kept everything about nuclear weapons a secret and thus the public could never weigh in and influence any nuclear decision making. This state existed until President Eisenhower declassified much of the nuclear weapons information as part of his Atoms for Peace program.
Arthur L. Caplan (born 1950), is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center and the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics.
