Bioethics Quotes

“Holy Christ, people, we’ve accidentally done what we sold to the public.”
― Joseph A. Anderson, Eden 2:b

“The Martians want to build a 2:b colony on Titan and not allow mixing of species, while the Bug and black market investors here on Earth want to experiment on them. Both the red and the blue planets have devilish plans for your people, I'm afraid.”
― Joseph A. Anderson, Return to Planet Earth

“In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients’ “ease” but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonguing and even magnifying patients’ dis-ease.”
― Jack Kevorkian, Prescription Medicide

“No, I'm the human here. I'm the life at stake. I'm the one with fingernails, who feels pain.

Me.”
― Alicen Grey

“This (...) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of those ideas that don't 'rock the boat', that refrain from challenging hallowed taboos.”
― Jack Kevorkian, Prescription Medicide

“Genetic technology might have to be rechristened "genetic art," for every work of art was an act of creation, and no act of creation was finer or more beautiful than the creation of an intelligent mind.”
― Dean Koontz, Watchers

“It’s not that I was categorically opposed to the idea of scientists and physicians using gene editing to introduce heritable changes into the human genome.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

“Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.”
― Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

“Eugenics has become a dirty word in popular culture because of its excesses in the early twentieth century, including forced sterilization laws in the USA and Germany (which were applied to the ‘feebleminded’ but sometimes also to epileptics and even sexual deviants). But a lot of the criticism of eugenics conflates what Galton and many modern academics in bioethics mean by ‘eugenics’ with how the Nazis misused it [...] Moral grandstanding has become so common in connection with the word that journalists often use ‘eugenics’ to mean something like ‘unjust coercion of innocent parents’. But Galton and Darwin would have rejected this, and so should we. According to Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and past president of the Eugenics Society of England, ‘Eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race’ [...] While people disagree about precisely which traits are worth promoting, what motivates eugenics is a concern that individual welfare depends in part on the average traits of a population, and that demographic trends matter to the extent that they influence the success or failure of entire populations.”
― Jonathan Anomaly, Creating Future People

“The concept of ethics in the field of medicine is much more salient than in other fields, primarily because, in medicine, we are dealing with the lives of people. A surgeon’s credo when performing surgeries rigidly follows the fact that what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong. If you cut a major nerve in the brain, mistaking it for an artery, it is your patient who suffers for the rest of his life—that is, if he even survives that mistake. Consequently, the philosophy of ethics in medicine extends to so many facets of life. Physicians must learn to respect culture, religion, traditions, and laws. We are bound (to speak, as if in hyperbole) by precepts or contracts that always safeguard the welfare and dignity of our patients.”
― Gavielle Gerico Cruz, The Medicine That Is Love

“From chariot horses in the ancient world, to Hannibal’s merciless exploitation of elephants to cross the Alps and confront the Roman Empire, animals have played a fundamental role in the long and murky history of human warfare. But it was not until the twentieth century that the military use of animals became distinctly sinister and bizarre. During the Second World War, the American army used kamikaze “tankdogs” to blow up German panzers. In their book A 'Higher Form of Killing', Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman describe how the dogs were taken away from their mothers as soon as they were weaned, and were only given food under the bellies of tanks. Once on the battlefield, the dogs were held on the verge of starvation, with explosives and a tall triggering antenna strapped to their backs. As the German panzers approached, the hungry animals were released. Running instinctively under the enemy tanks searching for food, the antenna would scrape along the metal belly, detonating the explosives and thus destroying both tank and dog.”
― William Johnson, The Rose-Tinted Menagerie

“But are the animals trained or brainwashed to become killers? Ironically, it was the neurophysiologist and “New Age Guru” Dr John Lilly who first perfected a technique of implanting electrodes into the brains of unanaesthetised animals to stimulate the “pain and pleasure sectors” of the mind. After butchering monkeys by the dozen at the National Institute of Mental Health, Lilly concluded that judicious manipulation of these brain areas could inspire joy and well-being, or pain, anger and fear. Indeed, by using the electrodes to deliver reward or punishment stimuli the animal could be entirely subordinated to human will. The ingenious Lilly then turned his attention to dolphins, under the pretext of wishing to “communicate” with these intelligent and highly perceptive creatures. To insert electrodes into the brains of the fully-conscious animals, holes were made in the skull with a sharp instrument and a carpenter’s hammer. According to Prof. Giorgio Pilleri, “the dolphin was held down but tried to jump up at every blow — not because of the pain, but because of the unbearable noise produced by the hammering."
Indeed, many of Lilly’s dolphins suffered an agonising death. “Despite disappointment and sadness,” he announced, “we had to go on with our research: our responsibilities lie with finding the truth.” It was not until years later however that a repentant Lilly finally stumbled across that apparently elusive truth. After suffering drug addiction and a mental breakdown, he characterised his research in an entirely different light: “I was running a concentration camp for my friends.”
― William Johnson