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For health and legal professionals with an interest in bioethics
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Bad film, crucial message
IT'S the season of pseudo-science in Hollywood. First we had the greenhouse effect on steroids in The Day After Tomorrow. And now, opening today, there's Godsend, a thriller about human cloning. In fact, Godsend is god-awful. Robert De Niro plays a high-flying but obsessed IVF doctor who takes a cloned embryo from a petri dish and places it in the womb of a hysterical mum. She wants to replace the eight-year-old son she lost in a car smash. The kid looks the same, but creepy things begin to happen. It's a bit like The Omen without the scary bits. But, astonishingly, this bomb ignited a huge controversy in the United States. Why? Because it might make audiences think twice about the wisdom of cloning embryos to cure diseases. And this broke the first commandment of embryo research: ``Thou shalt not hint that cloning an embryo for a grieving mother is exactly the same as cloning an embryo for an ailing diabetes patient.'' So a squadron of critics was dispatched to drop stuff on Godsend from a great height. A spray from the best-known bioethicist in the US, Arthur Caplan, was typical: ``Thanks, Hollywood. Just as people were beginning to understand cloning, you have put greed before need and made a movie that risks keeping ordinary Americans afraid and patients paralysed and immobile for many more years.'' The scientists are right about one thing. Godsend's science is largely mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus. Its confusing plot (the industry gossip is that the production team wrote several endings and chose the worst one) turns on the fact that the clone has been given memories of another dead child. It's fantasy, and Caplan and Co must see us as utter numskulls if they think that we'll swallow it. But like all science fiction, Godsend does convey some higher truths. The most trenchant of these is that scientists' arguments for cloning are often morally incoherent. At one point, the husband reproaches De Niro's character for having undertaken the project. And the doctor responds, ``If I'm not supposed to do this, then how is it that I am?'' With all their banality and lack of logic, these words sum up a common ethical argument for cloning human life. Everyone else is doing it. I'm smarter than they are. I have the technology. I have good intentions. Why can't I do it? Give me federal funding by three o'clock this afternoon or I'll move my lab to Uzbekistan. Researchers also contend that miracle cures from cloned embryos would make tinkering with human life ethically acceptable. But what if we reverse-engineer the logic of their ethics? If they can clone embryos, what else can they do with them? Australia's most famous bioethicist, Peter Singer, is a dab hand at reverse engineering. In his view, embryos are morally insignificant blobs. Therefore, scientists should be able to clone them and grow headless fetuses for their spare parts. S INGER hasn't been quoted much in support of therapeutic cloning. Perhaps he's a bit too consistent for comfort. Godsend suggests that we ought to think twice about cloning embryos. Bad as the film is, it shows that manufacturing human life in a petri dish is a moral issue of immense seriousness, not just a technological challenge. Godsend opens at a good time. Reproductive cloning is banned in Australia, but a vigorous debate over therapeutic cloning will take place soon. After the parliamentary stoush over embryo research in 2002, a three-year moratorium on the procedure was declared. This ends next year, and its supporters are already pressing for change. Professor Alan Trounson, Australia's leading spokesman for therapeutic cloning, recently visited the UN to lobby for it. A South Korean's success in cloning human embryos a few months ago proved that it could be done, and Australian scientists are eager to prove their mettle. But as Health Minister Tony Abbott said recently, ``Not all means are justified even by the best ends -- that's sometimes forgotten by people desperate for miracle cures to horrible diseases.'' It sounds as though he's seen Godsend as well. mcook@australasianbioethics.org. MICHAEL COOK is editor of the bioethics newsletter, BioEdge.
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