Virginia Postrel Quotes

Louise Brown's birth marked the end of the beginning of human IVF, acclaimed at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. This event was snubbed by some clinicians now styled as 'pioneers', who shouted that the test-tube claim was a fake! They did not matter.

I actually don't mind whether people can choose the sex of the baby - in fact humans have been trying to do it for 3,000 years. But there is a real issue about the safety of the technique.

It's to surprise people about something that is extremely well known. I mean human reproduction, the human body, nature and so on. To surprise them with a new technique.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

You cannot be against embryonic stem cell research and be intellectually and therefore morally consistent, if you're not also against in vitro fertilization.

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.

The refusal to acknowledge the scientific value of embryonic stem cell research is one more tragic misstep.

People still come up to me and ask whether I am Louise Brown or if they've seen me somewhere else before.

I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic cells growing in a petri dish.

About 3 million IVF babies have been born since Louise Brown's birth in 1978. Bizarrely, when this life-giving treatment was first considered, it was massively controversial. A storm of vitriolic protest came from many religious leaders, journalists, politicians, regrettably even other scientists and doctors.

All parties to the human embryo debate have something vital to defend.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.

Embryonic stem cell research has the potential to alleviate so much suffering. Surely, by working together we can harness its life-giving potential.

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.

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

While that amendment failed, human cloning continues to advance and the breakthrough in this unethical and morally questionable science is around the corner.

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

There are illegitimate parents, but I don't believe there are any illegitimate children.

My own field, the prevention of genetic disorders in babies, has been possible only because of humane work on animals.

I was a married woman and I had a baby. I would have adored it, but I just couldn't do it because I'm a lady.

Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.

People who are infertile will be able to have their own genetic children. So may same sex couples, since it may well be possible to make eggs from a man's skin cells or sperm from a woman's.

There may be illegitimate parents but there are no illegitimate children.