Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass is drawing a moral perimeter with a clinician's scalpel: if genetics feels "crude", it's because it announces its interventions loudly, at the level of DNA, lineage, and reproduction. You can argue with it in public. Neuroscience, by contrast, operates where the argument itself is made. "Goes directly to work on the brain" isn’t neutral description; it’s a warning about proximity. The closer a technology gets to the seat of perception, desire, and judgment, the easier it becomes to treat personhood as adjustable hardware.

The line "and the mind follows" does the real work. It collapses mind into downstream effect, suggesting that altering neural circuitry will necessarily drag beliefs, values, even conscience along with it. Kass’s subtext is less about scientific accuracy than about political and ethical risk: genetic engineering threatens what we are; neuro-intervention threatens how we choose, including the capacity to dissent from the intervention itself. If you can pharmacologically nudge mood, attention, impulse control, or memory, you don’t just change outcomes - you change the inner narrator that interprets those outcomes as chosen.

Context matters: Kass is a bioethicist associated with early-2000s debates over enhancement, cloning, and the commodification of life. This phrasing is calibrated to move readers from squeamishness about "designer babies" to unease about subtler tools: brain stimulation, psychopharmacology, predictive neuroimaging, even behavior-shaping interfaces. "Crude" is a strategic concession, granting genetics the role of obvious villain so neuroscience can emerge as the more intimate, more governable - and therefore more tempting - form of control.