It's much easier to clone an entire organism - it just involves producing an embryo of a few cells and then letting it do its thing.
Not at all. Cloning a mammal from an adult cell is incredibly difficult. Dolly the Sheep, cloned in 1996, was the only successful clone after 277 attempts.
SOURCE:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3314696/Dolly-creator- Prof-Ian-Wilmut-shuns-cloning.html
And that's a sheep. To create fully functioning human beings, with normal mental developmental as well as normal psychiatric development (they all seem to be quite free of most psychoses in the film) would necessitate a MASSIVE undertaking.
You would need not only tens of thousands of "regular" citizens all working towards this death industry with no pangs of conscience...but you would also need thousands of unquestioning surrogate mothers.
To clone just an organ you'd need to control the cells' development in a cell culture, with all the cells arranged in the right shape - SO much more difficult.
True....but if your society has the necessary technology to mass produce human beings and raise them to an adult age then your society has the technology to grow human organs in vitro. It makes no sense why it wouldn't.
...plus the author wanted to use humans for poetic licence.
Fair enough...but then the film only works as a very abstract parable since to use humans in his story he created a species of human beings that behaves like no human being has before: completely passive and accepting in the face of certain death.
Actually....more than passive...they not only did not resist...they actively ASSISTED in their own slow torture and harvesting. Not even animals behave like that.
As for your sci-fi argument... Why would the society in 1984 allow such intrusions into their life?
Human society has allowed massive control and loss of privacy before...look at the USSR in 1937 or East Germany circa 1970 etc.
Not that big of a leap to imagine a society like that.
Why would people trust a system of arresting people for crimes they're going to commit in the future in Minority Report?
People aren't accepting. A key point of the film was the fact that the Future Crimes Division is extremely controversial and only allowed in a trial-basis only in Washington D.C. Colin Farrel's character's entire purpose in the film was to judge whether or not this experimental system was truly flawless and could be trusted to be expanded nation wide.
Why would people allow genetic selection in Gattaca?
Why wouldn't they? We allow genetic selection now. We perform over a dozen tests on first trimester fetuses in order to determine whether or not they are carriers of genetic diseases. One genetic disease, Down Syndrome, is ACTIVELY tested for for the sole purpose of allowing parents to terminate those pregnancies if they so wish.
So many stories (especially sci-fi) are based around the idea of slightly different ethical views.
Yes...and it only works if the authors create a plausible world to explain those different ethical views. Otherwise the story falls apart on a second look.
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greg-233
12 years ago
In the 1997 book Clone by Gina Kolata, a reference is made to Dolly the Sheep:
If Dolly had been born in 1956, rather than 1996, it is likely that the world's reaction would have been radically different. Yes, theologians and some philosophers would have argued about the meaning of cloning an adult mammal and the prospects for cloning humans, but the organized ethics movement that drove the 1997 debate, the ethics committees of professional societies that issued opinions, even the national commissions set up by the United States and Europe to advise world leaders about the wisdom of attempting to clone humans, would not have existed. There may have been a public debate, but it would hardly have been so clamorous. And it is unlikely that local and national governments would have seriously considered passing laws to prohibit human beings from being cloned. - Clone
In the alternate world of
Never Let Me Go the first human clones are created in 1952. The conditions that led to this breakthrough are a matter of conjecture and speculation. In another thread I alluded to Ira Levin's clone novel
The Boys From Brazil in which the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele had successfully produced 94 clones of Hitler in the early 1960s. The story drew on the medical experiments Mengele conducted on twins in Auschwitz. If Germany had won WW2, it's unlikely that medical research on humans would have been restricted by moral and ethical concerns. Perhaps England and other countries would have adopted the discoveries the Nazis made? Especially if it led to things like prolonged life expectancy and elimination of diseases.
"To create fully functioning human beings, with normal mental developmental as well as normal psychiatric development (they all seem to be quite free of most psychoses in the film) would necessitate a MASSIVE undertaking."In
Never Let Me Go Hailsham was one of the "progressive" institutions for clones. Before Hailsham opened, clones weren't treated like people at all. After Hailsham closed, things more or less went back to how they were. Tommy mentioned "battery farms".
"You would need not only tens of thousands of "regular" citizens all working towards this death industry with no pangs of conscience...but you would also need thousands of unquestioning surrogate mothers."We don't actually know how many clones are living in England. I wouldn't have thought it was thousands. Not everyone in
Never Let Me Go was happy with the situation. When the teacher Miss Lucy explained to her students what would happen to them, it wasn't with any kind of relish. In
Never Let Me Go society doesn't look on cloning as a "death industry" any more than people look on abortion as a death industry. (Depending on whether you're pro-life or pro-choice.) Yes, there are those who oppose abortion, and it's a very complicated issue that makes people uncomfortable. But surgeons seem able to perform abortions without pangs of conscience. It's just a procedure that has to be done.
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histopaul
12 years ago
First of all: To excuse the aforementioned stories for their inaccuracies whilst attacking NLMG is hugely inconsistent, to verge on hypocritical. EVERY sci-fi film has scientific inaccuracies, because scriptwriters and authors are not professors of science. They have a story to tell, and use vague science as a tool. For example, Prometheus was bad not because it's explanation of genetics was excruciatingly wrong, but because its story was weak.
Secondly: The fact still remains that a sheep HAS been cloned, while a kidney or heart have NEVER been cloned, so my argument that a whole organism is much easier to clone over a complex organ still stands. The only synthetic organ created has been a bowel, which is about as basic as organs get.
it's also worth mentioning that Dolly was cloned back in 1996. Genetics and bio-technology has moved on light years in the last 16 years, even 5-10 years is a long time in science. The main obstacle to cloning organisms is the ethics behind it - it's pretty much entirely banned. Without those ethical boundaries (as there obviously aren't in NLMG), it's possible that cloning could be viable after a couple of decades of practice (although probably a lot later than in NLMG since the story starts in the late 90s with the practice already going on for at least 10-15 years).
Compare that to cloning organs where there are FAR fewer ethical obstacles, and so the main obstacle is the huge technical challenge. Getting cells to grow in an organised fashion (in the right location and orientated in the correct way) is a mammoth task since cells like to grow in liquid cell cultures, but organs need to be in three dimensions.
To be honest, the problem I have with clones is why use them at all? Although they're created in a laboratory, they still need a womb to grow in, so still require a surrogate mother. And if you need surrogate mothers, why not just use bog standard naturally conceived babies? But the film never really goes into the practicalities of how the babies are born, and it's a sci-fi story so it's never going to be 100% scientifically accurate anyway.
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