"Our models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that."
~
Never Let Me Go, page 140
The whole time I've had my theories about what donations are and what the Hailsham students' futures held, I missed one important aspect of everything. The students lived at the school (or institution or whatever else you want to call it) year round and never went to a house with parents, so I wondered whether they were simply born, put up for adoption, and taken to the school or if they even had biological parents. The latter is right. These people were cloned from others so that their organs could be harvested whenever they were needed. The first thing I thought of when ascertaining this was the movie
The Island. It's a little bit different (and I'm sure its themes also differ), but it has the same idea.
The movie is about two people who live in a very controlled society where everyone is kept at peak physical condition. A "lottery" selects one member of the community to go to the Island, a fantasy location where they will spend the rest of their life. However, what they don't know is that they aren't people, but clones of wealthy, important figures who live in the real world and pay millions of dollars to insure that they can get any body part whenever they need it. When a clone is selected to go to the Island, he is actually going to be harvested for whatever organ his owner needs. The movie calls into question the morality of genetic engineering and cloning and whether clones have souls and emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment