Science & Tech Quote by Brigitte Boisselier

Boisselier’s line is a neat rhetorical judo move: she takes the most common public reaction to reproductive tech - disgust - and reframes it as predictable, even passé. Calling it the “yuck effect” shrinks moral panic down to a gut reflex, a childish sound bite you can almost hear on a talk show. That’s the intent: not to win a philosophical argument about cloning or IVF, but to delegitimize opposition by diagnosing it as squeamishness rather than reasoning.

The phrase “every time” does a lot of work. It drafts history as her witness, implying a repeating cycle: new reproductive possibility appears, people recoil, and society later adjusts. That’s a comforting storyline for audiences who want to feel on the right side of progress without getting bogged down in bioethics. It’s also a pressure tactic: if you’re disgusted, you’re cast as predictable, behind, maybe even superstitious.

What’s left unsaid is where she’s speaking from. Boisselier’s public identity is tied to the most sensational edge of reproduction debates, where skepticism isn’t only about “icky” feelings but about safety, consent, exploitation, and fraud. By reducing critique to an emotional spasm, she dodges questions about power and accountability: Who gets to experiment? On whom? For whose benefit?

Culturally, “yuck” is a savvy media-age unit of meaning. It anticipates the headline, the clip, the viral recoil. She’s naming the public’s reaction in order to manage it - turning disgust into just another predictable stage of technological adoption.