"Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal."

"An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems."

"We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture."

"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."

"I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them."

"There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given."

"The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life."

"We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice."

"One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?"

"Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument."

"One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing."

"It's a short step from the belief that every child should be wanted to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants."

"We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing."

"The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics."

"The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether."

"Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman."

"Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects."

"It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country."

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

"I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful."

"We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it."

"Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children."

"I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites."

"In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman."

"The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good."

"We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years."

"The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right."

"Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit."

"My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes."

"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."

"Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion."

"Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities."

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

"Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering."

"As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God's image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one's own."

"If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness."

"In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one."

"It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters."

"Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries."

"Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes."

"Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows."

"There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies."