Virginia Postrel Quotes

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.

Genetic engineering is a result of science advancement, so I don't think that in itself is bad. If used wisely, genetics can be beneficial, but they can be abused, too.

We should place priority on the development of safeguards against unwise, permanent alterations in the human gene pool. Now that we have become principle agents of evolution, it is crucially important to recognize that the pursuit of short-term goals through human modification can be dangerously inconsistent with the long-term best interests of the human species.

We have the prospect of intervening in the natural lottery.

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 still have very little understanding of how we can tweak form or shape at the genetic level. We certainly haven't unlocked those secrets.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

Humans are something very different from animals, and the numbers required to get cloning to work in animals are completely prohibitory with humans.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

It's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span. I don't know if that's true, but we can't rule that out.

I'm a genetic optimist.

Imagine that: If you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan.

We discuss the potential drawbacks of genetic testing or genetic modification of crops. We do not discuss the suffering and environmental damage that will be caused by holding back innovation…. The debate is unbalanced here because it is complacent about the imperfect present.

The cloning of human beings can corrupt the natural foundations of childbirth, consanguinity, motherhood and fatherhood. A child can become a sister to her mother, a brother to his father or a daughter to his or her grandfather. The psychological consequences of cloning are also extremely dangerous. A human being, who came to being as a result of this procedure, can feel not like an independent person but only "a copy" of someone who lives or lived before. It should be also considered that experiments with human cloning will inevitably produce as "by-products" numerous unfulfilled lives and, most probably, the emergence of a numerous unsustainable posterity. At the same time, the cloning of isolated organic cells and tissues is not an encroachment on the dignity of the personality and in a number of cases has proved helpful in the biological and medical practice.

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 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.

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.

… we think once we do activate a genome, that yes, it probably will impact people’s thinking about life.

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.

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

We have created life.

We face the prospect of the economically rich getting genetically richer.

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

Legislation against this type of cloning [therapeutic] is Canute against the ocean …. medieval views must not hold back the future…. We need government as a partner, not as an enemy.