B-grade thriller sparks controversy: Hollywood tackles cloning again

'Tis the season of pseudo-science in Hollywood. First we had the greenhouse effect on steroids in The Day After Tomorrow. And now there’s Godsend, a thriller about human cloning.

Or rather, “thriller” according to the publicity blurbs. In fact, Godsend is god-awful.

Robert De Niro plays a prestigious but obsessed IVF doctor who takes a cloned embryo from a Petri dish and places it in the womb of an 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 really scary bits.

A geeky friend in Singapore sent me a pirate copy not long ago. But it turned out that the film was so boring that the pirate fell asleep in the picture theatre and my eagerly-awaited copy had a 10-minute gap where his camcorder had failed. “It doesn’t make any difference,” said my friend -- and he was right.

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 scenario 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.

The world’s leading science journal, Nature, coaxed Godsend’s scriptwriter into abject self-criticism: “It would mortify me if it was used to condemn stem cell research.” Nobel laureate Harold Varmus denounced it in The New York Times for blurring the boundary “between the plausible and the implausible”.

The best-known bioethicist in the US, Arthur Caplan, sputtered: “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 & Co must see us as utter numbskulls 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 foetuses for their spare parts. Perhaps that’s why Singer hasn’t been quoted much on therapeutic cloning: he’s a bit too logical.

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 technical assignment.

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 around the world are already pressing for change. 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.

Professor Alan Trounson, Australia’s leading spokesman for therapeutic cloning, recently visited the United Nations to lobby for therapeutic cloning. He is part of an international push to ban reproductive cloning while securing public funding for therapeutic cloning. One of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, recently had a special issue on therapeutic cloning and gave it an almost unqualified endorsement.

But as Health Minister Tony Abbott said not long ago: “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 saw Godsend too. If he hasn’t, he’s welcome to my slightly abridged pirate copy.