Word: feared
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Life (Perseus), written with Karen Lindsey. In it, he writes, "The emotions of dying are intense, difficult and varied. But they are not necessarily terrible; indeed, sometimes they are incredibly beautiful, and even at times extremely happy. I always consider how our culture's overwhelming fear of death blots out that reality: we rarely achieve a whole view of dying, which encompasses every emotion." He believes suicide is never the best choice, focusing instead on pain relief. His determina- tion to ensure a peaceful end to life may be reassuring to those baby boomers who remain determined...
...afternoon, some members argued for total war--a party-line vote to proceed however they chose. The Democrats were doing Clinton's bidding, they argued, and would never go along with a bipartisan deal; they were counting on a long trial to make Republicans look partisan and obsessed. The fear of a voter backlash was no reason to abandon principle. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who won with just 49% of the vote in 1994, told the conference, "I'm up in 2000. And if you read the papers, I'm an endangered Republican species. But I'm not worried about...
...candidate's tenure in front of their colleagues in the department, tenured faculty are asked by the Office of the Dean to write confidential letters for the eyes only of the deans, the ad hoc committee, and the president. The use of the confidential letter reflects the fear that otherwise tenured faculty will bow to pressures from their colleagues and fail to express their candid opinions to officers of the administration...
...moral I draw from this painful episode is this: Never postpone experiments that have clearly defined future benefits for fear of dangers that can't be quantified. Though it may sound at first uncaring, we can react rationally only to real (as opposed to hypothetical) risks. Yet for several years we postponed important experiments on the genetic basis of cancer, for example, because we took much too seriously spurious arguments that the genes at the root of human cancer might themselves be dangerous to work with...
Unlike many of my peers, I'm reluctant to accept such reasoning, again using the argument that you should never put off doing something useful for fear of evil that may never arrive. The first germ-line gene manipulations are unlikely to be attempted for frivolous reasons. Nor does the state of today's science provide the knowledge that would be needed to generate "superpersons" whose far-ranging talents would make those who are genetically unmodified feel redundant and unwanted. Such creations will remain denizens of science fiction, not the real world, far into the future. When they are finally...