Cloning

As I began reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, the narrator Kathy is talking about one of here donors, and refers to a time when she was telling him about her school Hailsham saying "the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his." This quotation sparked a memory of my own that brought me back to a movie that I had seen when I was about sixteen called The Island, directed by Michael Bay.

The reason this quotation made me think of this movie was because this movie has to do with the idea cloning human beings and using them to provide organs for the humans they were cloned from. In the movie they have childhood memories programmed into them so that they do not realize they are clones. There is a lot of other cover up to ensure that the inhabitants of the facility do not realize that they are clones as well.

As I read further into the novel it kept reminding me of The Island, because the guardians seemed to be keeping secrets and not really elaborating on things that seemed important to Kathy and her peers. I kept reading about donors who were having to recover from what I thought was an operation which kept reminding me of movie.

I started to predict the direction of the book and felt that it would turn into a very similar story line where these students in Hailsham are going to try to dig deeper into what is really going on at this institution. They may be in the same situation as those in The Island where they are basically being grown to donate organs to their genetically identical human counterparts and hope to find a way out.

Although this book is fiction it does raise some very interesting questions in scientific studies being done today. Technology today has been developed to the point where organisms can be cloned and are on a day to day basis for many different reasons. However laws have been imposed to prevent cloning of humans due to ethical factors that would create very unsettling feelings among the earthly population.

I due believe in the near future however that this issues will become very real and will cause some very dramatic discussions. Maybe not in the sense where humans are being cloned to donate organs but just the organs themselves being grown in a lab, or possible another organism close to a human such as a pig, so that someone in need can be genetically matched to ensure a heart or kidney is not rejected by their body.

As great as it sounds, there are also negative aspects to the positive ones that occasionally put into question the ethics behind some of the methods used and I doubt that they will ever be cleared up.