I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious pe… - James Watson

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

My youthful reasoning on the subject, however absurdly misinformed, nevertheless taught me a very valuable lesson: the danger of assuming that genes are responsible for differences we see among individuals or groups. We can err mightily unless we can be confident that environmental factors have not played the more decisive role.
This tendency to prefer explanations grounded in “nurture” over ones rooted in “nature” has served a useful social purpose in redressing generations of bigotry. Unfortunately, we have now cultivated too much of a good thing. The current epidemic of political correctness has delivered us to a moment when even the possibility of a genetic basis for difference is a hot potato: there is a fundamentally dishonest resistance to admitting the role our genes almost surely play in setting one individual apart from another.

Watson: Our society just hasn't faced up to this problem. In a primitive society, if you saw that a baby was deformed, you would abandon it on a hillside. Today this isn't permissible, and with our medicine getting better and better in the sense of being able to keep sick people alive longer, we are going to produce more people living wretched lives. I don't know how you get a society to change on such a basic issue; infanticide isn't regarded lightly by anyone. Fortunately, now through such techniques as amniocentesis, parents can often learn in advance whether their child will be normal and healthy or hopelessly deformed. They then can choose either to have the child or opt for a therapeutic abortion. But the cruel fact remains that because of the present limits of such detection methods, most birth defects are not discovered until birth. If the child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.