Without exception, every technology that gives us power to do something good also produces the risk of being used for nefarious purposes. That being said, we need to keep moving forward and make sure that people understand how to apply new and better technologies for good.
Dean Kamen President, DEKA R&D; Chairman, ARMI and Founder, FIRST®
I wish that believers had the same faith that you have in science, because science changes all the time. We learn new things all the time, and thus the most accurate representations of what we consider to be reality changes. We can go back to the 1800s before quantum mechanics, before relativity and look at physics and realize it’s radically different today. So really, in a sense, faith is much more steady, stable and provides that foundation for trying to take all these wonderful new discoveries that we encounter in our scientific pursuits and make sense of them, not just for ourselves as scientists, but for everyone.
Rev. Kevin FitzGerald, SJ, PhD John A. Creighton University Professor and Chair, Department of Medical Humanities, Creighton University
I would argue that wellness and healing work best when our spiritual nature is also considered. To disregard this limits the potential we may have to assist individuals to live out a life that is as healthy as possible and to have a health span that is as maximally beneficial. We are spiritual creatures, and we always need to explore how the mind, body and soul affect our health.
Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD Director, U.S. National Institutes of Health
Because we have such great power to now understand and manipulate life, we desperately need to put that power into a moral and ethical context so that it benefits all of society. We don’t want progress for the sake of progress. We want progress so that we may transform lives in a proper way.
Andrew C. von Eschenbach, MD President, Samaritan Health Initiatives; Former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 12th Director, National Cancer Institute
That we have all kinds of phenomenal experiences, that there’s a seed of free will that we use to make decisions, that we have conscious experiences, sensations, emotions, feelings – all of this is easily handled by the system that deals with minds. We see plenty of evidence that our minds are readily dissociable from bodies. Bodies may be a good cue that there is a mind being here if they have the right kind of faces or body shapes and the like. One of my favorite pieces of evidence? A majority of children, before they’re about age six, have imaginary friends.
Justin L. Barrett, PhD President, Blueprint 1543; Honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences, St. Andrews University, School of Divinity
Even the youngest babies show some degree of compassion towards others, some capacity for moral judgment. They could see something as right and something as wrong. They have some universal moral core. On the other hand, a lot of what we see as morality, the wrongness of racism and sexism, the importance of being kind to far-away strangers – that does not come naturally to us. That’s the product of culture. In morality, we see a perfect case study of the interface between our biological natures and the cultural environments in which we live.
Paul Bloom, PhD Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology, Yale University
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