Bioethics Quotes

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight. ~ Alice Dreger

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003 ~ Ray Kurzweil

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

Whenever people start talking about curing too many things with science, I'm always glad bioethics wasn't ~ Jodi Picoult

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics. ~ Arthur Caplan

No, I'm the human here. I'm the life at stake. I'm the one with fingernails, who feels pain.

Me. ~ Alicen Grey

First, where the law is the major source for bioethics, morality is too easily confused with legality and moral questions too quickly reduced to legal questions. Moreover, the law is better at
telling us what not to do than at providing ends and goals worthy of our humanity. ~ Allen Verhey

It is recorded in the monastic rules that a monk once performed an abortion on a girl; the Buddha judged his action seriously wrong, which incurred him the highest offense in the monastic rule. A monk committing this kind of wrongful deed must be expelled from the monastic community. The Buddha considered the embryo to be a person like an adult, so the monk who killed the embryo through abortion was judged by Buddhist monastic rules as having committed a crime equal in gravity to killing an adult. In the commentary on the rule stated above, it is stated clearly that killing a human being means destroying human life from the first moment of fertilization to human life outside the womb. So, even though the Buddha himself did not give a clear-cut pronouncement about when personhood occurs, the Buddhist tradition, especially the Theravada tradition, clearly states that personhood starts when the process of fertilization takes place. ~ Soraj Hongladarom

In short, bioethics investigates ethical issues arising in the life sciences (medicine, health care, genetics, biology, research, etc) by applying the principles and methods of moral philosophy to these problems. ~ Adele Langlois

People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak. ~ Arthur Caplan

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

Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government. ~ John Leo

The great historian of religion Martin Marty once said every religion serves two functions: First, it is a message of personal salvation telling is how to get right with God; and second, it is a lens for interpreting the world.
Historically, evangelicals have been good at the first functions- at "saving souls". But they have not been nearly so good at helping people to interpret the world around them- at providing a set of interrelated concepts that function as a lens to give a biblical view of areas like science, politics, economics, or bioethics.
As Marty puts it, evangelicals have typically "accentuated personal piety and individual salvation, leaving men to their own devices to interpret the world around them. ~ Nancy Pearcey

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