Al comprenderse la condición genética en su formación y posibilidades, se debe evitar el entorpecimiento de un avance que se dirija a mejorar al hombre y a resolver sus problemas, y desatar las ataduras con visiones conceptuales que obstaculizan la evolución humana hacia lo mejor.
Santos Cifuentes, Elementos de derecho civil, Buenos Aires, 1995, pp. 105-106
If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000, p. 446
[N]o one has the guts to say it, [but] if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we? […] Evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity [to it]? I’d like to know where that idea comes from, because it’s utter silliness.
James Watson, ‘The Road Ahead’, in Gregory Stock and John Campbell (eds.), Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children, Oxford, 2000, pp. 77, 85