With terminal illness, your fate is sealed. Morally, we're more comfortable with a situation where you don't cause death, but you hasten it. We think that's a bright line. Comparing the U.S. with Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal for patients suffering 'intolerable health problems.'

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.

The challenge is for bioethicists to position themselves to be on panels, boards and other decision making bodies where oublic policy positions wil be established-where the exploding changes in health care that are now underway will be addressed.

With terminal illness, your fate is sealed. Morally, we're more comfortable with a situation where you don't cause death, but you hasten it. We think that's a bright line. Comparing the U.S. with Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal for patients suffering 'intolerable health problems.'

[Cloning] can't make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.

There has never been just 'coach class' health care, but with these amenities you are seeing people get priorities according to your ability to pay. It's one thing to say you get perks; it's another to say you can buy your way to the head of the line.

People ask, 'Is the science going to run ahead of the ethics?' I don't think that's always the problem. I think it's that the science runs ahead of the politics. Bioethics can alert people to something coming down the road, but it doesn't mean policy and politicians are going to pay attention. They tend to respond when there's an immediate crisis. The job of the ethicist, in some ways, is to warn or be prophetic. You can yell loudly, but you can't necessarily get everybody to leave the cinema, so to speak.