“Our main goal is not to cause any harm or additional stress to families,” says Nancy Spinner, head of genomic diagnostics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Clinics in India pay poor women a lot of money to be surrogate mothers, but "the contracts are usually written to protect the wealthy people who are commissioning the baby," says ethicist Arthur Caplan.

"Computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system," says inventor and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil.

Biological and technological evolution "is a spiritual process," says this famous futurist. "Entities become more godlike, never reaching that ideal but moving in that direction exponentially."

Purposefulness and self-sacrifice in human life "can never be reduced to a machine," according to this bioethicist.

There is a proposal on the ballot in Mississippi that would say human life begins at conception. If the measure passes, every fertilized human egg in Mississippi would be defined as a person, and that could make abortion, for any reason, murder.

Expensive cancer-fighting drugs are sparking ethical debate about the tremendous costs and limited benefits of some new treatments.

Donating organs "is considered an altruistic, charitable act, and all the major religions look favorably upon that behavior," says ethicist Robert Veatch.

Watch scenes from an emotional meeting of transplant donors and recipients after the largest kidney exchange ever.

"We can open up the question of financial incentives" for organ donations "without worrying about undue coercive pressures," says medical ethicist Robert Veatch of Georgetown University.