Leon Kass
Leon Kass
Leon Richard Kassis an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual, best known as proponent of liberal education via the "Great Books," as an opponent of human cloning, life extension and euthanasia, as a critic of certain areas of technological progress and embryo research, and for his controversial tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth12 February 1939
CountryUnited States of America
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
But veteran lawmakers torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against Washington politics. When you see what can happen to a page or a junior congressman, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what political power really is, .. Who are we to impose this emotional albatross on public servants? As a nation, we pretend to elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make them a special class to suffer for our sins over wrongheaded laws, or pay a continuing emotional price for securing their future careers.
Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.
Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.
The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.