Daily Inspiration Quote by Leon Kass

Kass’s line is a reminder that every “obvious” medical success story was once an uncontrolled experiment with human stakes. By pointing to IVF, a technology now normalized to the point of banality, he retrofits our comfort with hindsight into a warning: today’s controversial biotechnologies may feel inevitable tomorrow, but inevitability is not an ethical argument.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Nobody knew” shifts the debate from morality to epistemology: the real scandal, he implies, isn’t that people disagreed, it’s that they couldn’t possibly have had the certainty that modern advocates often project backward. “In advance” flags the temporal asymmetry that public policy routinely ignores; society is asked to grant permission before the evidence arrives, then judged as prudish when the outcome turns out fine. The hedge “by and large” is Kass at his most deliberate. He concedes safety without granting perfection, leaving room for the remaining hard cases - risks to mothers, long-term outcomes for children, the commodification pressures around reproduction - that get flattened by victory laps.

Context matters: Kass built a career worrying about bioethics as a cultural force, not just a technical one, and later became a prominent voice urging restraint around cloning and genetic engineering. IVF is his chosen exhibit because it disarms easy caricatures. If even this widely celebrated innovation required a leap into uncertainty, he’s saying, then the burden of proof and the humility of regulators, scientists, and would-be parents can’t be an afterthought.