Margaret Atwood Quotes

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

The Church believes that human organs cannot be viewed as objects of purchase and sale. The transplantation of organs from a living donor can be based only on the voluntary self-sacrifice for the sake of another's life.

I often ask people if they would like to give their organs when they pass on, and they say "Well, I'm not so sure, I don't know." And I said, "Well, would you accept one if you needed one?" "Well, yeah, sure." And I say "Well, there you go - where do you get them from?".

The self-driving car is coming. And right now, our best supply of organs come from car accidents... Once we have self-driving cars, we can actually reduce the number of accidents, but the next problem then would be organ replacement.

In early January I introduced my legislation, which, besides prohibiting Federal funding of human cloning, also expresses the sense of Congress that foreign nations should establish total prohibition on human cloning as well.

If we intensify our efforts we can have a cloned baby within a year or two, but I don't know whether we can intensify our efforts to that extent. We're not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one.

There are a lot of people highly motivated to be the first to clone a human.

I encourage everyone I know to sign an organ donor card, but if someone doesn't want to sign, that's his or her choice. If someone isn't willing to give an organ, however, why should that person be allowed to receive an organ?

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.

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

Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics.

You cannot be against embryonic stem cell research and be intellectually and therefore morally consistent, if you're not also against in vitro fertilization.

From its earliest days, stem cell research has been important to the people of Wisconsin.

With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.

There are two kinds of cloning right now. One is therapeutic cloning which is for coming up with cures for life threatening, really, really awful diseases. Then there is reproductive cloning, which is to make a human being out of your DNA and a donor egg.

Britain should be the world's number one center for genetic and stem cell research, building on our world leading regulatory regime in the area.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

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.

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 use of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer to create stem cells does not constitute "human reproductive cloning" and that the donor compensation program does not improperly make grant funds available to be "directly or indirectly utilized" for such cloning.

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.