Films from the Future - Andrew Maynard

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their art. The trouble is that Tommy never had any art selected by Madame. It seems that their fragile hope is about to be dashed because Tommy didn’t do enough when he was younger to prove his worth.

      Despite this, the two lovers think they see a way forward. Tommy starts afresh developing his art portfolio, so he has something (he believes) to demonstrate his “worthiness,” and the two of them set out to visit the address provided by Ruth. Yet, on getting there, the couple are devastated to discover that Madame has no ability to grant a deferment; she never did.

      It turns out that Madame and Miss Emily were working as a team at Hailsham, but not to seek out evidence for true love. Rather, they were using the students’ art to determine if they had souls, if they had human qualities worth valuing beyond a working body and healthy organs.

      The two women earnestly wanted to find a way to show that these children were capable of human feelings, and that they had validity and worth beyond the organs they were carrying. Yet for all their moral angst, Madame and Miss Emily turn out to be all mouth and no backbone. They lament Kathy and Tommy’s plight. But they also dash their fragile hopes, claiming there’s nothing they can do to help.

      As Kathy and Tommy return to the care home that night, Tommy calmly asks Kathy to stop the car, and gets out. The whole weight of the despair and injustice he’s carrying crushes down on him, as he screams and weeps uncontrollably for the hope and the future that society has robbed him of. In that one stark, revealing moment, Tommy shows the full depth of his humanity, and he throws into sharp relief the inhumanity of those who have sacrificed him to the gods of their technology.

      As Tommy and Ruth complete, and Kathy becomes a donor herself, we realize that asking whether they have souls was the wrong question. We’re left in no doubt that these young people deserve respect, and dignity, and autonomy, and kindness, irrespective of what they have achieved. And we realize that, through them, the society that created the technology that produced them has been judged, and found wanting.

      Never Let Me Go is a movie that delves deeply into the questionable morality of convenient technologies. It’s also a movie that challenges us to think about how we treat others, and what separates humanity from inhumanity. But before we get there, it’s worth diving deeper into the technology that underpins the unfolding story we’re presented with: cloning.

      On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep was born. What made Dolly unusual was that she didn’t have regular biological parents. Rather, she was grown from a cell that came from a single animal.

      Dolly the sheep was the first successful clone of a domesticated animal from an adult cell. And the proof that this was possible shot the possibility of cloning from science fiction to science fantasy almost overnight.

      In Dolly’s case, the DNA from an ordinary, or somatic, cell—not a reproductive cell or stem cell—was injected into an unfertilized egg that had had its nucleus removed. This “clone egg” was then electrically shocked into starting to divide and grow, after which it was implanted in the uterus of a third sheep.

      Dolly was born healthy and lived for nearly seven years before she was put down due to increasingly poor health. But the legacy of the experiment she was a part of lives on. What her birth and life demonstrated without a shadow of doubt is that it’s possible to grow a fully functioning animal from a single cell taken from an organ, and presumably to keep on doing this time and time again.

      It’s easy to see the attraction of cloning large animals, at least on the surface. Loved pets could be reproduced, leading to a never-ending cycle of pup to adult and back to pup. Prize livestock could be duplicated, leading to large herds of prime cattle, or whole stables of thoroughbreds. Rare species could be preserved. And then there are people. Yet cloning human from scratch is harder than it might at first seem.

      In July 2016, there was a flurry of articles marking the twentieth anniversary of Dolly’s birth. In one of these, bioethicist Hank Greely astutely pointed out just how hard cloning still is, even after two decades of work: “Cats: easy; dogs: hard; mice: easy; rats: hard; humans and other primates: very hard.”18 The trouble is, while the concept of cloning is pretty straightforward, biology rarely is.

      The basic idea behind cloning is to remove the DNA from a healthy non-reproductive cell, insert it into a viable egg cell, and then persuade this to develop into a fully functional organism that is identical to the original. The concept is seemingly simple: the DNA in each cell contains the genetic code necessary to create a new organism from scratch. All that’s needed to create a clone is to convince the DNA that it’s inside a fertilized egg, and get it to behave accordingly. As it turns out, though, this is not that easy. DNA may contain all the right code for creating a new life, but getting it to do this is tricky.

      This trickiness hasn’t stopped people from experimenting, though, and in some cases succeeding. And as a result, if you really want to, you can have your dog cloned,19 or pay a company to create for you a clone-herd of cattle.20 And there continues to be interest in cloning humans. But before we even get to the technical plausibility of whether we can do this, there are complex ethical challenges to navigate.

      Despite advances in the science of cloning, the general consensus on whether we should allow humans to be cloned seems to be “no,” at least at the moment, although this is by no means a universally accepted position. In 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a “Declaration on Human Cloning” whereby “Member states were called on to adopt all measures necessary to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.”21 Yet this was not a unanimous declaration: eighty-four members voted in favor, thirty-four against, and thirty-seven abstained. One of the more problematic issues was how absolute the language was in the declaration. A number of those member states that voted against it expressed their opposition to human reproductive cloning where a fully functioning person results (human reproductive cloning), but wanted to ensure that the way remained open to therapeutic cloning, where cloned cells remain in lab cultures.

      This concern over human reproductive cloning seems to run deep. Certainly, it’s reflected in a number of the positions expressed within the UN Declaration and is a topic of concern within plenty of popular articles on cloning. The thought of being able to grow people at will from a few cells feels to many people to be unnatural and dangerous. It also raises tough questions around potential misuse, which is something that Never Let Me Go focuses our attention on rather acutely.

      In 2014, the online magazine io9 published an article on nine “unexpected outcomes of human cloning,”22 keeping the fascination we have with this technology going, despite the deep moral concerns surrounding it. These unexpected outcomes included ownership of clones (will someone else own the patent on your body?), the possibility of iterative improvements over generations (essentially a DNA software upgrade on each cloning), and raising the dead (why not give Granny a new lease on life?). The article is admittedly lighthearted. But it does begin to dig into the challenges we’ll face if someone does decide to buck the moral trend and start to turn out human facsimiles. And the reality is that, as biomedical science progresses, this is becoming increasingly feasible. Admittedly, it’s incredibly difficult at the moment to reproduce people. But this is not always going to be the case. And as the possibility comes closer, we’re going to face some increasingly tough choices as a society.

      Yet despite the unease around human cloning, there are some people who actively suggest the idea shouldn’t be taken off the table completely. In 1997, not too long after Dolly’s birth, a group of prominent individuals put their name to a “Declaration in Defense of Cloning and the Integrity of Scientific Research.”23 Signatories included co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick, scientist and writer Richard Dawkins, and novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

      This Declaration acknowledges how knotty an ethical issue human cloning is, and it recognizes up front the need for appropriate guidelines. But where it differs from the later UN Declaration is that its authors suggest that human cloning isn’t as ethically or morally fraught as some people make out. In fact, they state:

      “We see no inherent ethical dilemmas in cloning non-human higher

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