Kass is the most influential of the country’s bioconservatives, the ethical traditionalists with a knowledge of biology who urge restraint when dealing with new genetic technologies. The son of secular Jewish immigrants, he earned a biology degree at the University of Chicago, where he was deeply influenced by its “great books” core curriculum. He got a medical degree from Chicago and a PhD in biochemistry from Harvard. With his wife, Amy, he went to Mississippi in 1965 as part of the cadre of civil rights workers registering Blacks to vote, an experience that reinforced his faith in
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