The promise and the peril of our are inextricably linked with the promise and the peril of modern science. On the one hand, the spread of knowledge has overcome superstition and reduce fear born of ignorance, and the application of science through technology has made life less poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Liberal Arts of Human Biology, the College and the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He has been a senior fellow at the National Institutes of Health ans erved as the Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Research Professor in Bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University.