Evening:
The stage is simply adorned with a desk and a chalkboard. The play has not begun yet. Professor Elias Voss hobbles into view while the audience is still milling around. The lights remain on for now. He carries several books and other educational aids. He has an obvious limp, and can be seen struggling to maintain control of the objects in his hands.

Voss: Ahem!!

Voss repeats this until the audience calms down.

If the house is less than pretty full Professor Voss says this:
Voss: Thank you all for coming. I can see that my Genetic an d Bioethics class managed to secure its usual… intimate headcount. Hopefully none of you will drop out, or I will lose the privilege of this wonderful lecture hall…

If the house is quite full or packed, he says this:
Voss: Thank you all for coming. I hope you all managed to find your seats. God knows why they decided my Genetic and Bioethics class belongs in the core curriculum. I can assure you, there are many other classes I teach that are more broadly useful, but… here we are .

Voss uses this time talking to set up and organize his desk. He turns to the lights tech.

Voss: Percival, please dim the lights.

(All lights dim, including the lights on stage.)

Voss: Percival!

Stage lights come back up.

Voss: Thank you Percival. Apologies, us faculty are assigned teacher’s assistants based on major, and obviously most Philosophy majors are not intimately familiar with lighting apparatuses.

(Professor Voss proceeds to give the audience the welcome speech and points out emergency exits etc.
Once this is finished…)

Voss: Now!.. I’m certain that when you told your parents that their bright little one had been accepted to the wonderful, prestigious, and expensive Maulstrom-Withors University, they exclaimed with glee in their thrilled, ecstatic little voices something along the lines of “Oh my dear! You’re so smart! I can’t believe it! That’s wonderful! You simply MUST make sure that in your brief time there you intentionally set aside three of your precious and valuable credit hours - worth $6800 a piece before taxes - to the study of ethics regarding bioengineering and genetic science!!!”
I’m sure that this class was likely not something you thought about much before registering for it this summer. I don’t know if you are here to fulfill a prerequisite, or to fill up hours to remain a full time student, or if you are genuinely curious. I once had a student join my class because he lost a bet with his roommate. That is not important to me. What is important to me, is seeing that each of you leaves here with some sort of value by the time this class has ended.

Prof. Voss proceeds over to the chalkboard to write the phrase “BIOENGINEERING | ETHICS”.

VOSS: (dusting chalk from his hands)
Now, most of you are likely familiar with the term "bioengineering," and I believe I’m correct in guessing your first thought was of becoming a cyborg or acquiring artificial limbs. (gestures to his own leg with a wry smile) While, of course, these technically fall within the bounds of the field, most of the work surrounding bioengineering involves far less glamorous pursuits—like coaxing bacteria to produce insulin or editing genes to prevent hereditary diseases.
But first, a little history. Before we could splice genes or grow organs in labs, we had to ask: Can we? And more importantly: Should we? The answer, historically, has been a resounding "We’ll do it first and argue later."
Take Dr. Willem Kolff in 1943, tinkering with sausage casings and orange juice cans to invent the first dialysis machine. Or Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, who in 1978 turned a petri dish into a cradle for Louise Brown, the first… "test-tube baby."
(pauses, eyes sullen with obvious disconcert)
And let’s not forget Dr. James Watson—who gave us the double helix and then spent the next fifty years giving us reasons to revoke his Nobel Prize.

(walks along the edge of the stage, lowering his voice)

By the 2020s, we’d moved from repairing life to redesigning it. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier handed us CRISPR like a loaded pistol. Craig Venter synthesized the first artificial cell and named it Synthia — because some scientists think they have a sense of humor. And then in the early 2030’s, once Dr. Margaret Ashman found the key to creating a unified structure using all these synthetic cells, well, all hell broke loose. Organ donors became irrelevant. Amputees became was-putees (under his breath, while tapping his artificial leg) *if you had the money*. Everyone’s appendix was replaced with the Carlos-Rosario append-vax. (Gesturing to the class) As a matter of fact, I’m fairly sure that at least a third of you students here have this very invention helping your immune system right now.
These are all wonderful of course! The human race is more robust than it ever has been before! Even if they have cancer, they can replace the cancerous organ like a part from a machine. People have started using these procedures for cosmetic purposes, and not just medical ones. Many of you have never heard about this, but in the 2090’s, a very prominent fad was having differently shaped pupils!
Well, that’s all well and good, but many skeptics have pointed out that, if a company makes all the parts necessary for making a car, there is nothing stopping them from putting it together and selling a car.

(Prof. Voss lets the class sit for a moment to make the connection themselves)

VOSS: Now you’re thinking about bioethics.
Several decades ago, the largest scale of human genetic manipulation, and the most controversial application of artificial tissue growth was brought to public attention, and then swiftly forgotten by the broader population. If you ask someone on the street about “Vita Kindergarten” they won’t remember much.

(pauses, staring off into the floor)

VOSS: It was… more than that… Vita Kindergarten was the first ever laboratory to successfully grow a human child from conception to term without a surrogate mother. Their patent on their Vita Cradle system that enabled this created… Well, it created problems for the bioethicists, that’s for sure. Their facility enabled them to produce and house up to 40 subjects at a time - one for each week of a human pregnancy. It was utterly unprecedented. Of course, this generated quite a lot of controversy at first, but Vita Kindergarten eventually started to win some people over to their mission. Their target demographic were couples who were unable to conceive their own children. They could even tailor the DNA to more closely match that of the prospective parent. They were the most perfect breakthrough of their kind.

(Voss pauses for a long moment, and resumes talking in a much more measured tone)

VOSS: Though it quickly fell out of the public spotlight, I view this as the most important point in the field of bioethics in the last century.
Because the very night before the first child they ever finished was to be publicly adopted, the facility was attacked and it burned to the ground.

(Pauses, shaken)

VOSS: … And in the aftermath, we had to find exactly how much they were worth.