The book “Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion” is written by author Brian Alexander. This post has some quotes from scientists featured in the book.
Dr. Cynthia Kenyon:
“All I am saying is, it must not be the case there is some awful trade-off or we would not have long-lived animals.”
“You look at these worms that live twice as long and it just takes away everything you always thought about aging. We always thought it was just the way it was. It was not negotiable, you know? But it is! And that’s what’s really cool.”
“I wanted to get started quickly because, look, I’m getting older. Seriously.”
“The germline is totally immortal and that means life does not have to age.”
“I am a very rigorous, critical scientist and yet the kind of things I look at are things you think should never happen. It should not be possible. And yet there it is, proving you can come face to face with miracles.”
Dr. David Hubel:
“You don’t want to put your hands on sick people. You can do more good for medicine in the sciences. Understand as much science as you can and apply it.”
Dr. Douglas Melton:
“What does it take to be a bioethicist? What would it take? My undergraduate degree is in philosophy and when you read a book by Wittgenstein, you know you have read a work by somebody who has thought deeply about something. This business about announcing you are a bioethicist and you will comment on what is moral and what is not, which real philosophers would never do… Why can’t scientists comment on bioethicists! Kass and his buddies pretend and present themselves as real moral authorities! The arrogance of this is shocking!”
Dr. E.O. Wilson:
“The expansion of human knowledge with science and technology, especially neuroscience, genetics and evolution, renders traditional religious belief less and less tenable.”
Dr. Ed Cannon:
“We have to age because the only way to reproduce is to mature to reproductive age, but once that has happened, it would be nice to modulate aging as a way to avoid disease or impairment to our quality of life.”
“If Albert Einstein were alive, look at the problems he might be able to help us solve.”
Dr. Florence Haseltine:
“There are people who want to control everything. There are people who want to control when people have sex, so the fact you want to control when people live or die does not surprise me. But it is going to be out of their hands, out of the politicians’ hands. The science will leapfrog over them. Say you ban stem cells. And they find the body’s stem cells do the same thing. Then you ban not dying and people get around it some other way. Who knows?”
Dr. Gordon Lithgow:
“Science fact and science fiction are so close right now. We squirt something on worms that makes them live longer. I mean, that’s science fiction!”
Dr. Greg Benford:
“Ours is the first rational solution to death, the nontheological solution.”
Dr. Ian Wilmut:
“We can look forward to an age in which the understanding of life’s mechanisms will be virtually total… from this understanding will come – if we choose – total control.”
Dr. James Watson:
“If the first clone is born it’s not going to kill the Earth.”
Dr. Jerry Lemler:
“The old guard set the dream, but now science must carry the day. Science is now our future.”
Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson:
“We have the responsibility and obligation to conduct research to the best of our ability and to develop new technology and always reject the status quo. In doing so, we should listen to the guests, to our own patients. We should not be paternalistic and assume we know what they need… If we do that, we will not have any trouble with the new technologies, the new genetics. We have every reason to embrace it and to encompass it, and not to fear it.”
“The vehemently intense objections made against the original [IVF] researchers and clinical studies dissipated, even while some of the same ethicists who made such misjudgments in the 1970s and 1990s are rising, phoenix-like to attack newer reproductive advances, often in the same hypercritical mode.”
Dr. John Gurdon:
“I personally believe that in time we will create any cell we want and any organ we want. We know that this must be possible.”
Dr. Michael Rose:
“Who knows, maybe Natasha will get her future body after all.”
Dr. Michael West:
“I have searched every corner of the edifice of religion and I think I know better than many people any basis for hope that death is not the end of existence, and I came up bankrupt.”
“If you go back and look at this, the apocalyptic hope, why would people build up any belief systems that the world would come to this conflagration? In my opinion these millennial beliefs have their root in the recognition that the existential thing is correct: everybody we know will die, and all meaning becomes dust. That’s no fun. So [believers] think this world and the evils we live with will undergo a climax and will change. We’ll all be made immortal. The origins of apocalyptic belief are a hope for intervention, a rescue.”
Dr. Richard Cutler:
“If we are sincere about increasing life span, we have to do something about the aging process itself, not just piecemeal diseases.”
“There is this thinking that it is bad to really interfere and increase life span, but we’ve never had a Manhattan Project whose aim and direction was to go after this thing called aging.”
Dr. Tanja Dominko:
“I don’t think anything is impossible in biology anymore. Not after what I’ve seen happen.”
“Once you can start with a population of [skin cells] there is nothing you cannot do before you change them or after you change them. Gene targeting, knockouts, replacements, you name it. Mutations, change the genes, splicing. Nothing you can’t do anymore. It’s all possible. Absolutely.”
Dr. William Haseltine:
“I saw a very clear opportunity to build a new company, to solve most of the key problems that most biotech companies had had. That is, too few ideas, too little money, and too little time. I felt, with this technology, we could get unlimited ideas for new drugs. One gene made one protein, made one drug or one antibody target. It was very simple.”
“It turns out that in science nobody likes anybody who disproves anything. It is much better to prove something than disprove it, but that way it’s hard to learn anything.”
“If there is a path to human immortality that is it. First it will be for health and regenerating tissues, but then it will be for rejuvenation.”
“At its most simple, regenerative medicine is the ability to replace and restore normal health, organs, tissues, and cells damaged by disease, injured by trauma, or worn by time. That is a very high aspiration but it is one all of you know is coming into clear focus.”
“We are embarking on a great enterprise: the formation of a new field of medicine that will improve the lives of people everywhere. The key insight of regenerative medicine is that every human being was once a single cell with the potential to transform into an adult body. Each of our cells retains that remarkable potential in a latent form. We have over the past decade learned how to identify the molecules that our bodies use to direct that great unfolding. We can now isolate, study, and produce those substances in virtually unlimited quantities and use them to regenerate our tissues and organs.”
“The real goal is to keep people alive forever.”
“I always try to look at what’s next.”
“There is no reason why we can’t live forever, and there is no reason why we shouldn’t.”
