Science Quote by Paul Berg

Berg’s sentence is doing more than marking a bioethics controversy; it’s drawing a map of how modern societies decide which kinds of knowledge are allowed to exist. The key verb is “disavowed.” Not debated, not regulated, not even condemned outright, but socially repudiated - a moral distancing ritual. He’s naming a moment when a line of inquiry (human embryonic stem cells, cloned stem cells) gets treated less like a technical question and more like a stain.

The intent is diagnostic, almost weary: today’s taboo is stem cells, yesterday’s was something else. Coming from Berg - a Nobel-winning biochemist who lived through the recombinant DNA panic and helped shape the Asilomar guidelines - the subtext is clear. Scientific risk can be managed; what’s harder to manage is the public theater of purity. He’s implicitly contrasting responsible governance (rules, oversight, containment) with blanket ethical vetoes that stop research before it can even generate the evidence needed to judge its promise or peril.

Context matters: early 2000s stem-cell politics fused genuine moral concern about embryos with Cold War-ish language about “cloning,” producing an easy villain and a hard-to-explain science. Berg’s phrasing “attempts to prepare cloned stem cells” is careful: he’s talking about research tools and therapeutic aims, not sci-fi replication. The line works because it exposes the rhetorical sleight of hand in the controversy: when a procedure is framed as an affront, the hoped-for patients vanish from view, and the argument becomes less about outcomes than about enforcing a boundary on what counts as ethically speakable.