Never Let Me Go: the organ donation debate continues

The movie has already prompted renowned ethicist Margaret Somerville to write that issues in the disturbing plot might be closer to us than most of us realize.

Ishiguro's novel was published at a time when infertile women in their 40s began sourcing eggs from young women and when parents of sick children turned to IVF to create perfect "saviour siblings". As a society, we've only got better at using people's bodies for our own gains; look at Nicole Kidman's recent announcement of a new baby via what she dubbed "a gestational carrier."

Such commercial surrogacy illustrates what Somerville calls "convergence" -interventions that become possible only through the combination of separate technologies. Ishiguro's clones are the result of "genetic, reproductive and organ transplant technologies". Somerville writes: "Each technology, taken alone, raises serious ethical issues, but combined they raise ethical issues of a different order, as we see in Never Let Me Go." (themark.com, Nov 25, 2010)

Accordingto The Independent on Sunday, the "superb" film adaptation of Ishiguro's literary novel demands that the decision not to award it the Booker Prize in 2005 "should surely be revisited." However, one of the judges, Rick Gekoski, told the newspaper that he has no intention of seeing the film. "It's too creepy", he says, "It's effective but a film about organically reared children farmed for their organs? At my age? No." (Jan 30)

The trouble is that avoiding the issues won't make them go away. Somerville rightly points out that this new movie depicts "a morally compromised world not unlike our own."