James D. Watson Quotes

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.

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?

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

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.

Biohacking could literally change the world as we know it.

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.

Genetic engineering is a result of science advancement, so I don't think that in itself is bad.

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.

As we decipher our biology and learn to modify and adjust it, we are learning to modify ourselves - and we will do so. No laws will stop this.

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.

Genetic modification has many different areas, for example in medicine, and Britain is at the leading edge of this new technology. I don't know, but people tell me, it could indeed by the leading science of the 21st century. All I say to people is: 'Just keep an open mind and let us proceed according to genuine scientific evidence.'

The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these 'omics' that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward.

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

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?

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

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

Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.

If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.

The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can't eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as 'progress', doesn't spread.

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.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

If we did find that (most) mathematically gifted people possessed a special gene, would implanting such a gene in our children ever be justified? If certain traits are objectively superior to others, should we not promote active potentials to acquire such traits? The difficulty in answering this question lies in the fact that we live in a pluralist society. If people were to disagree about the ranking of certain characteristics, how would we decide which ranking is the correct one? It may be true that some characteristics are objectively superior to others (or better before God). And it may be true that many people would be capable of picking out a few such superior qualities. But who is to be appointed supreme judge?

New technologies are often met with skepticism. But if the world is to continue the remarkable progress of the past few decades, it is vital that scientists, subject to safety and ethics guidelines, be encouraged to continue taking advantage of such promising tools as CRISPR.

We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.