Ezekiel Emanuel Quotes

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

Patients' lives are more important than embryos. I do want to avoid the use of embryos if possible.

I am not prepared to explain to a sick child with cystic fibrosis, facing death and fighting for breath, the ethical grounds that hinder the science which could save him.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

I support stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research.

The self-driving car is coming. And right now, our best supply of organs come from car accidents... Once we have self-driving cars, we can actually reduce the number of accidents, but the next problem then would be organ replacement.

Is it or is it not ethical to create an embryo, and to create a person for the purpose of getting an organ to give to someone else? Your knee-jerk reaction is 'absolutely not;' but you need the ethical analysis of that to show why and how that is something that you need to stay away from.

What is fetus farming? Simply put, it is the creation and development of a human fetus for the purposes of later killing it for research or for harvesting its organs.

I do not understand how anyone can, in good conscience, tell a family whose child is suffering from a life-threatening disease that politics is more important than finding a cure.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called 'Les Mains d'Orlac.' Call it a bastard offspring of 'Frankenstein;' its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn't Have - in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

How can you regret helping a suffering patient?

With Charles Woods, it was the first time I had ever seen tissue from a dead person used to save a human life. It piqued my curiosity.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.

I never want to possibly take another life in my hands.

I think you should automatically donate your organs because that would turn the balance of organ donation in a huge way. I would donate whatever anybody would take, and I'd probably do the cremation bit.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

We give antibiotics to people when they're dying or when they're not well; that's acting God. I mean, acting God is using the tools of creation to try and improve human life, human existence. I don't think that that's a huge problem.

I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn't have done differently. In wartime, it was a desperate time .... When you are in a war to the death, I don't think you stand around and ask, is it right?

Finding a balance between hoped for cures and respect for life: That is the challenge.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a society saying, “It’s all right use embryonic stem cells to save your dying dog, but it’s not okay to use them to save your dying child.”… America’s love affair with animals will slowly but inevitably undermine the religious, moral, and ethical arguments against genome-based therapies for people. Healthier cats and dogs will generate an irresistible demand for healthier children and adults.

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.

The difficulty of finding organs suitable for transplantation on man must be met.

When you have multiple patients on life support, you don't pull the plug on one just to save another.