Bioethics Quotes

“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