What a wonderful example of the importance of context! You give weight to and illustrate Dr. Kass' very reason for the comment that you quote out of context.
This passage is in the last paragraph of the essay, "Thinking About the Body," (pp.276-298 in my paperback copy of the 1988 edition by Free Press publishers) which describes different societal rules about the *dead* body and how it is treated and considered. After pages discussing the ways "that we are by practice forced to decide who or what we think we are, really, and most of all. How to treat dead bodies may seem to be a trivial moral question, compared with all the seeminly vital problems that confront the living. But from a theoretical point of view, few are as illuminating of our self conception and self-understanding."
This statement is dealing with the way that different societies treat dead bodies as a reflection of "who or what we think we are," at the end of a long essay about dying (and our perception of what happens between the moment of life and death) medical study and practice, and the influence of the treatment of the body as "the motions of inorganic particles" vs. "pure will and reason." It is not a discussion about research or morality, but about the living body of the thinker about the body and the treatement of the body by the thinker after death.
Kass discusses the differences between what science and medicine study and teach vs. every day knowledge, customs and intuition. He tells (of Herodotus' telling of Darius' telling) of the differences between the customs of the Greeks, who burned their fathers' bodies after death, the Indians who are said to eat the bodies of their fathers after death. The Greeks are supposed to see the difference between the body and the father, while the Indians do not.
The paragraphs just before your quote:
""Though little noted, our story features a third people: the Persians in the person of their king, Darius. Darius is presented as the man who has seen through the mere conventionality of conventions. Indeed, he revels publicly in his discovery. He compels people to look upon ways that are not their own, to confront what must be seen from his detached and enlightened view as the simple arbitrariness of their own way. Having transcended the limits of law - especially those tied to ancestral piety - he makes sport at the expense of the pious. Strict rationality is the Persian way: "The most disgraceful ehing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie." We learn elsewhere in Herodotus that the Persians looked to nature as divine - but only to the aloof remote, permanent, and regularly moving boidies of the heavens (sun, moon, and stars), beings so unrelated and indifferent to human affairs that they might for all practical purposes just as well be absen. (In practical terems, the Persians were indistinquishable from atheists - and their practices show it.) Their funeral practice is what you might expect:
"There is another custom which is spoken of with reserve, and not openly, concerning their dead. It is said that the body of a male Persian is never buried, until it has been torn either by a dog or a bird of prey."
""The Greeks, it seems are a mean between the superstitious Indians and the automous Persians, reverent rather than fanaticla or impious, reasonable rather than either irrational or hyperrational. In honoring the bodies of their ancestors, they acknowledge their own gratitude for the unrepayable gift of embodied life. Yet, they make their peace with mortality by facing up to it and, through such representatives and Pindar and Heodotus himself, seek the enduring through memories, poems, and inquiries into the naked truth of things.""
The sentence following yours is,
"We expend enormous energy and vast sums of money to preserve and prolong bodily life, but, ironically, in the process, boidily life is stripped of its gravity and much of its dignity. Rational but without wonder, willful but without reverence, we are on our way to becoming Persians."
None of this additional context changes my objections to Kass. He's trying to set up a false dualism between the revered human life, as viewed by religions, and the understood human life, as unstood by Harvey and his progeny when the dissection of corposes for scientific study began. The whole idea that to understand something scientifically diminishes the wonder of it is the essence of the Luddite worldview. In their own time of popularity the left Luddites tried this same approach with "nature" substituted for "human". Can't we simultaneously increase our understnading of the human body and feel reverent toward it? And why is early, paiful death more noble than life - maningful, usable life - prolonged by technology? Why does the innate nobility of man not also apply to his works?