The president's hostility to research involving human zygotes has a long history. A generation ago, in 1971, Dr. Leon Kass anticipated Mr. Bush in a polemic against IVF entitled "Babies by means of in vitro fertilization: unethical experiments on the unborn?" Kass raised the banner of bioethics against assisted reproduction and defined a rigid notion, of the origin of life. (2) In turn, Kass's question was posed by the devout at the dawn of the 20th century, when Jacques Loeb at the Marine Biological Laboratory succeeded in activating a sea urchin egg in vitro: what price for life in a dish of salt water? The New York Times downplayed "Dr. Loeb's Incredible Discovery," calling it "very interesting but not especially important, [since it] will not revolutionize our concepts of the origin of life" (3).
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