Arthur Caplan Quotes

We recognized in 1996 that, with progress in the field of genetics accelerating at a breathtaking pace, we need to ensure that advances in treatment and prevention of disease do not constitute a new basis for discrimination.

One of the good things about the public Human Genome Project is that the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health spent a part of their budget on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

The overall view of the human genome project has been one of great excitement and positive press, but there are people who have concerns that are quite reasonable, and they are frightened of things they don't understand.

There's massive government initiatives going around the world, and you see that there's a real enthusiasm for genetics.

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 is important to democratize personal genetics and make it more accessible.

As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused.

Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.

I absolutely hated 'Gattaca.' I left the theater shaking my head because the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left. No genetic test will ever be more accurate in telling an employer how well you'll do at a job than your performance at a past job would be.

India has the opportunity to be a leader in genetic engineering, It has institutions that no other country has.

I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.

DNA sequencing opens vast ethical issues. We shall be able to know who has defective genes. What will it mean when we can be sure we're not all born equal? Worked out, the implications will scare a lot of people. Insurance companies will not want to cover those with a genetic predisposition to illness, for example. Here lurk myriad lawsuits.

April 25th is DNA Day. I know, you probably had no idea.

Patenting tends to get people's juices flowing when you put the word 'gene' and the word 'patent' in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we're carrying around - all of us - inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it?

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

Your genetic profile may qualify you for the lowest insurance rate ever offered! You don’t have to subsidize anyone else’s inferior genes again! DNA Life Insurance Company introduces Immortal Life, the policy for the superior man or woman with unsurpassed gene fitness.

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.

I think I've achieved some good things; doing the first genome in history - my team on that was phenomenal and all the things they pulled together; writing the first genome with a synthetic cell; my teams at the Venter Institute, Human Longevity, and before that Celera.

I think we're just scratching the surface. One of the most exciting aspects of 23andMe is that we're enabling you to watch a revolution unfold live during your lifetime, and I think that the decoding of the genome, in my opinion, is the most fascinating discovery of our lifetime, and you get to be part of it.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about genetic information and what you can and cannot learn. One of the things we try to do is educate individuals that knowing information is empowering.

When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.

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.

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.