Quotes & Sayings About Embryos

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case. — Sam Harris

We traveled for science: those three small embryos from Cape Crozier, that weight of fossils from Barkley Island, and that mass of material less spectacular but gathered just as carefully hour by hour, in wind and drift, darkness and cold, was striven for in order that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of on what it thinks. — Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Is it more ethical to edit embryos or to screen a lot of embryos and throw them away? I don't know the answer. — Jennifer Doudna

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. — Samuel Butler

We shall therefore take an appropriately correct view of the origin of our life, if we consider our own embryos to have sprung immediately from those embryos whence our parents were developed, and these from the embryos of their parents, and so on for ever. We should in this way look on the nature of mankind, and perhaps on that of the whole animated creation, as one Continuous System, ever pushing out new branches in all directions, that variously interlace, and that bud into separate lives at every point of interlacement. — Francis Galton

We can continue to make significant strides in the scientific community by exploring new stem cell research methods that do not include destroying human embryos. — John Boehner

I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn't even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women-of embryos, of eggs, of bodies-by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn't freedom from men but total control by men. — Vandana Shiva

There is no way now to get around some use of embryos. But my goal is to avoid using them. — Shinya Yamanaka

Your brain never stops developing and changing. It's been doing it from the time your were an embryo, and will keep on doing it all your life. And this ability, perhaps, represents it greatest strength. — James Trefil

Endings are the embryos of new beginnings. — Gina Greenlee

When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way. — Shinya Yamanaka

Physical existence is so cramped.We grow old and bent over like embryos.Nine months passes;it is time to be born. The lamb wants to graze green daylight. There are ways of being born twice,of coming to where you fly,not individually like birds, but as the sun moves with his bride,sincerity. — Rumi

He rubbed his hands. For, of course, they didn't content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.
"We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future ... " He was going to say "future World Controllers", but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries" instead. — Aldous Huxley

Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills. — Richard Dawkins

Embryos turn into babies; buds turn into blossoms; acorns turn into oak trees. The same programming that exists in them exists in each of us - to manifest our highest potential. What is the difference between those things and us? That we can say no ... So today, say yes. — Marianne Williamson

This is the bud of being, the dim dawn, The twilight of our day, the vestibule; Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death, Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar, This gross impediment of clay remove, And make us embryos of existence free. — Edward Young

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements. — Marsden Hartley

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked - pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses - all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing - bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn't even know we shared a womb. — Douglas Coupland

We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. - In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. — George Eliot

It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

We are here simply to decide whether Congress should take the taxpayer dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use them to fund the destruction of human embryos for research. — Mike Pence

Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway. — Stephen Hawking

Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time ... It's just harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter. — Ann Coulter

For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature. — John Gurdon

Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. — Sam Harris

Well, there are two kinds of stem cells: adult stem cells, which you can get from any part of a grown body, and embryonic stem cells. These are the inner- core of days-old embryos that can develop into any kind of cell. — Mort Kondracke

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation. — Robert Remak

As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally undeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man, but partly hopeful. Run along then, and do your best. — T.H. White

My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos. — Robert Edwards

I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object ... Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves pro-life. — Ayn Rand

The bill would ban human cloning, and any attempts at human cloning, for both reproductive purposes and medical research. Also forbidden is the importing of cloned embryos or products made from them. — Ken Calvert

Each year thousands of embryos, no bigger than the head of a pin, are created in the process of in vitro fertilization, with the support of Congress, by the way. — Lois Capps

So many women come to me saying, "I have lost too,
and this one, and this one". So many embryos retreat
to flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don't tell me that it
will happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:
the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes. — Zoe Brigley

The Norwegian scientists have observed that among hundreds of genetically identical trees, grown from seedling to adult side by side in the forest, the trees that had been embryos under a cold climate invariably set their buds two to three weeks earlier than do their counterparts, anticipating a longer, colder winter. — Hope Jahren

It's especially fitting that they call a cruise ship 'she,' for she is pregnant with a thousand adult embryos who long to stay forever warm and sheltered in this great white womb. — Helen Van Slyke

The right-to-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church are saying that it is better to destroy these embryos, or preferably have them adopted - which is not going to happen - than to use them for research. — Mort Kondracke

Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken. — Mary Roach

Outlaw embryo farming, but allow using surplus embryos. — Mitt Romney

A landscape glittered behind her voice. There were icicles in it and savage fields of ice, great storms boiling over a flat countryside striped with white rails - a chessboard beneath a storm. Horses were stretched forever at the gallop. Tiny men in silk were brave beyond bearing and sat on the horses like embryos with their knees in their mouths. The gorgeous names of horses were cried from mouth to mouth and circulated in a steam of fame. Lottery, The Hermit, the great mare Sceptre; the glorious ancestress Pocahontas, whose blood ran down like time into her flying children; Easter Hero, the Lamb, that pony stallion. — Enid Bagnold

This was our last stop. This was it. We had those two embryos that we had banked prior to learning about the breast cancer, and with the medicine she was on, this was our last effort. The prayers were answered. — Bill Rancic

Patients' lives are more important than embryos. I do want to avoid the use of embryos if possible. — Shinya Yamanaka

What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn't have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos. — Peter Singer

A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo). — Keith L. Moore

In recent weeks we learned that scientists have created human embryos in test tubes solely to experiment on them. This is deeply troubling, and a warning sign that should prompt all of us to think through these issues very carefully. — George W. Bush

They don't go in for the fancy or exotic, but stick to conventional food like flightless bird embryos, minced organs in intestine skins, slices of hog flesh and burnt ground grass seeds dipped in animal fats; or, as it is known in their patois, egg, sausage, bacon and a fried slice of toast. — Terry Pratchett

I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning. — Mitt Romney

Lamium

Migraine dreams, jagged seams,
A badge of love and pain.
Or dreamy eyes, sleepy eyes,
Drooping, closing, losing light.
Packages scattered under the tree,
Some torn open, some tied tight.

Is there a heartbeat in those purple veins?
Are those embryos or mouths or rosary beads?
The color of my first dress, gathered with love,
Fairy cups stirred with blades of grass,
notes clustered on a windy score,
Three blooms, three friends, alas!

Grape flowers, cloud flowers, love flowers,
Paper parasols upside down, a butterfly herd
Stopped to rest by a deep green pool.
Petals small as a child's tears good-bye,
Dropped stitches everywhere
From a blanket the color of sky. — Louise Hawes

It is not possible to think of a way of screening out effectively the most appropriate embryos, and hence, what we should expect would be late abortions
either occurring spontaneously or being induced deliberately in the second or third trimester of pregnancy
in order to prevent the birth of abnormal children. — Ian Wilmut

What do you mean she left me the embryos? I'm supposed to get the cat. — Susan Mallery

The term pre-embryo is useful in the political arena - where decisions are made about whether to allow early embryo (now called pre-embryo) experimentation - as well as in the confines of a doctor's office, where it can be used to allay moral concerns that might be expressed by IVF patients. 'Don't worry,' a doctor might say, 'it's only pre-embryos that we're manipulating or freezing. They won't turn into real human embryos until after we've put them back into your body.' — Lee M. Silver

The private sector can go forward, if it must, with destruction of embryos for questionable and ethically challenged science. But spend the people's money on proven blood cord, bone marrow, germ cell, and adult cell research. — Roger Wicker

Our real teacher has been and still is the embryo, who is, incidentally, the only teacher who is always right. — Viktor Hamburger

If you are in support of in vitro fertilization, then you have to recognize that human embryos are being created in excess of what can be used safely to reimplant for a pregnancy. So they're going to end up being discarded. — Francis Collins

I am opposed to both cloning and the destruction of human embryos and adamantly opposed to funding of embryonic stem cell research. — Sandy Adams

Any kind of manipulation with human embryos should be prohibited. — Ian Wilmut

It has already been stated that various parts in the same individual, which are exactly alike during an early embryonic period, become widely different and serve for widely different purposes in the adult state. So again it has been shown that generally the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar. — Charles Darwin

Cancer, then, is quite literally trying to emulate a regenerating organ - or perhaps, more disturbingly, the regenerating organism. Its quest for immortality mirrors our own quest, a quest buried in our embryos and in the renewal of our organs. Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host - imbued with both immortality and the drive to proliferate. One might argue that the leukemia cells growing in my laboratory derived from the woman who died three decades earlier have already achieved this form of perfection. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Un-fucking-believable," Mark muttered. "In a country where they let embryos drive cars, I have to wait until I'm twenty-one to buy alcohol. What sort of place lets you drive and vote and fuck before it lets you drink a beer?" He glared at Deacon accusingly. "Well? — Lisa Henry

In systemic searches for embryonic lethal mutants of Drosophila melanogaster we have identified 15 loci which when mutated alter the segmental patterns of the larva. These loci probably represent the majority of such genes in Drosophila. The phenotypes of the mutant embryos indicate that the process of segmentation involves at least three levels of spatial organization: the entire egg as developmental unit, a repeat unit with the length of two segments, and the individual segment. — Christiane Nusslein-Volhard