Leon Kass Quotes

Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.

Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

This is a matter far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities. The belief that surrogate mothers and clonal babies are inevitable because science always moves forward, an attitude expressed to me recently by a scientific colleague, represents a form of laissez-faire nonsense dismally reminiscent of the creed that American business, if left to itself, will solve everybody's problems. Just as the success of a corporate body in making money need not set the human condition ahead, neither does every scientific advance automatically make our lives more 'meaningful.' No doubt the person whose experimental skill will eventually bring forth a clonal baby will be given wide notoriety. But the child who grows up knowing that the world wants another Picasso may view his creator in a different light.

We managed to write chapter one. Chapter two, we will have a child a parent can take home and raise as a cloned child.

Suppose that 'Unsolved Mysteries' called you with news of a long-lost identical twin. Would that suddenly make you less of a person, less of an individual? It is hard to see how. So, why would a clone be different? Your clone would be raised in a different era by different people - like the lost identical twin, only younger than you.

There is absolutely no doubt about it, and I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen.

The federal and state governments should ban the use of taxpayer funds to support cloning and embryonic stem cell research.

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.

In Massachusetts, scientists have created the first human clone. The bad thing is that in thirty years, the clone will still be depressed because the Boston Red Sox will still have not won a World Series.

At the moment, our society does not permit human cloning. But that could change.

Cloning, wow. Who would have thought? There should be a list of people who can and cannot clone themselves.

I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

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.

I never knew anyone who was cloned, but I played one in 'Multiplicity.'

Human cloning is coming.

We're not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and Michael Jacksons of the world, but rather assisting infertile couples that deserve the right to have a biological child to have one.

We are not interested in cloning the Michael Jordans and the Michael Jacksons of this world. The rich and the famous don't participate in this.

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.

I would kill the clone. That would be my first response.

We've had cloning in the South for years. It's called cousins.

You might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.

Anti-human cloning legislation is, for infertile Americans, the equivalent of anti-reproduction legislation.

Creating a child by cloning at this time is a moral outrage …