"ethicists—those dinosaurs in philosophy departments"

The narrator is a Civil War historian inspired by Shelby Foote's "great compromise"*...

"I asked Lucas if he had seen an article in the paper a few days ago, one about a certain experiment that had resuscitated some dead mice. "Those Lazarus mice, right?" he answered. "Yeah, I read about them. My colleagues in the philosophy department are pretty worked up about it." "Why the philosophy department?" "It's the ethics behind this, it's all new and has caught them off guard. The geneticists, the biologists, they've seen this coming for a while, ever since we mapped the human genome." Lucas took another long pull on his coffee, which he clutched between both hands. "What was that? Five years ago? If you can map out genetic structures, then you can map out cellular ones. Which means it isn't so big a step to go from engineering to re-engineering cells. The building blocks have existed for years. Someone's finally put it all together. Geneticists, cytogeneticists, even oncologists, most weren't too surprised to hear about the mice. It's the ethicists—those dinosaurs in philosophy departments—they're the ones who hadn't been watching. They've got no idea how to respond. One day you're resurrecting mice, the next day people. What are the ethical implications? They don't have a clue.""

* "I'd chosen to study the Civil War and Foote had become my fixation. On C-SPAN Book TV, in a July 26, 1994, interview, he had said, "In the Civil War, there's a great compromise as it's called. It consists of Southerners admitting, freely, that it's probably best that the Union wasn't divided. And the North admits, rather freely, that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is a great compromise and we live with that and it works for us." How, at times, I wished I could un-see that clip. It had become the contentious seed from which my tangled work germinated. I had become obsessed with the role of compromise in the sustainment of American life, as well as our relatively recent departure from it as an American virtue. I had my theories on what contributed to our current plague of polarization: gerrymandering, the shifting media landscape, campaign finance laws; however, identifying the causes wasn't enough, it would do nothing to ease our grim national mood, which I would have diagnosed as rage-ennui." 

— Halcyon: A novel by Elliot Ackerman