What if we found a cure for cancer? Diabetes? Even death? What would we willing to sacrifice for these medical miracles? Modern medicine has recently come made advances in the area of human cloning. Being able to successfully clone humans would solve many of our current medical problems and increase our life expectancy exponentially. Medically clones would be a solution to almost every problem we currently face. Morally however, the use of clones as medical supplies poses it’s own difficulties. Kazou Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go explores the ethical boundaries of creating an entire race of humans who’s only purpose it to supply organs. Beneath its straightforward plot line Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is an understated …show more content…
The children are raised by guardians and treated as normal children. All their needs are attended to and the children are unknowingly spoiled. Hailsham is a perfect atmosphere for children to be raised, and the students believe their lives are perfect. Their knowledge of the outside world is minimal. Guardians only teach them enough to survive the two-three years they must fend for themselves living in the Cottages. The students are told horror stories of the world outside Hailsham. The students are constantly praised and told they are special. They do not know they are being raised to give away their organs. The students feel that their lives are perfect based on the knowledge they have of the outside. As Kathy says to her friends while at Hailsham “Children out there don’t have enough to eat or even beds to sleep in, so hush Ruth we’re the lucky ones”(Ishiguro 27). The students are brought up with an almost spoiled entitlement. The truth was kept from the children by extreme means. Those who visited Hailsham from the outside world were not allowed to speak about the outside world. One guardian Miss Lucy attempted to tell the students the reality of their futures. Most were too blinded by the lessons they had been taught as children to understand their fate. However, as Ms. Emily spoke more bluntly they began to understand and ear their futures. She was fired shortly after this and they did not speak of her
If cloning for therapy became available, its application would thus likely be restricted to chronic conditions. Wilmut , who cloned Dolly, has suggested that cloning treatments could be targeted to maximize benefit: an older person with heart disease could be treated with stem cells that are not a genetic match, take drugs to suppress her immune system for the rest of her life, and live with the side-effects; a younger person might benefit from stem cells from cloned embryos that match exactly. Devolder and Savulescu have argued that objections about economic cost are most forceful against ‘cloning for self-transplantation’ than, for example, against cloning for developing cellular models of human disease. The latter will enable research into human diseases and may result in affordable therapies and cures for a variety of common diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, which afflict people all over the world. Finally, some have pointed out that it is not clear whether cloning research is necessarily more labor intensive than experiments on cells and tissues now done in animals.
The idea of finding a way to cure people of diseases with their own cells is one that scientists, physicians, and those who are afflicted by such diseases find very enticing. Therapeutic cloning is a process that scientists believe has the potential to achieve such goals in the future. While therapeutic cloning brings with it a variety of potential benefits and innovations, it also carries with it a polarizing ethical conflict that poses a strong impediment to furthering such research and development. By realizing therapeutic cloning for its great potential benefits and world changing implications and disregarding any ethical considerations that may deter such advancement, the proper focus and open-mindedness necessary to achieve success in the field would be achieved. Therapeutic cloning, like all medical endeavors, includes a multitude of challenges and flaws, but no very important medical achievements come about without extensive research and continual attempts at success.
Human cloning is described as “the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human.” Although human cloning has no record of being successful, cloning was demonstrated to be possible when scientists Sir Ian Wilmut and the rest of their research team successfully cloned Dolly, a sheep (Wilmut 12). This demonstration opened up a new area of science ready to be explored. If animals can be cloned, can human beings be cloned too? If successful, scientists would be able to clone human copies and further advance modern medicine, such as using cells for regenerative medicine or harvesting organs for transplants. It is also possible that other fields of medicine and research can be furthered with this supply of human clones. Additionally, couples incapable of reproducing can pursue cloning to create an offspring with their DNA. However, human cloning has never been successful and comes with ethical concerns.The clone can suffer from abnormalities. There are also concerns regarding the treatment of embryos to gather stem cells and the treatment of clones as a person. By further investigating and analyzing this topic through the lens of Catholic moral tradition, I hope to make clear the pros and cons of the subject while also evaluating them with an ethical theory learned from this quarter in order to add to the discussion.
What exactly is a dystopia, and how is it relevant today? E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops uses a dystopian society to show how one lives effortlessly, lacking knowledge of other places, in order to show that the world will never be perfect, even if it may seem so. A society whose citizens are kept ignorant and lazy, unknowing that they are being controlled, unfit to act if they did, all hidden under the guise of a perfect utopian haven, just as the one seen in The Machine Stops, could be becoming a very real possibility. There is a rational concern about this happening in today’s world that is shared by many, and with good reason. Dystopian worlds are often seen as fictitious, though this may not be the case in the
Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and AIDS are some of the most lethal diseases that people die from every single day. These diseases can be passed on into the next generation of our children. Although, this problem could be avoided by using the method of cloning. In addition, our best and bravest soldiers that are sent into wars often times come back with missing limbs. These veterans can't walk without a prosthetic or feed themselves without a nurse. Cloning would enable them to improve the quality of their life by letting them truly experience what goes on around them and that is why they would greatly appreciate the mechanisms of cloning. Cloning has the power to enable these individuals to live out their dreams and continue to show their patriotism. In other cases, cloning could bring hope to a patient who is undergoing the transplant process, a tedious, difficult, and nonetheless expensive procedure. Yes, it is true that thousands of people are saved each year by organ transplantation, yet even more die each year waiting while their organs shut down. Many people have suffered accidental medical tragedies during their lifetimes. Some include a girl who needs a kidney, a burn victim, a girl born with cosmetic
Popular literature often reflects society’s beliefs and struggles, and dystopian fiction is once again gaining popularity. From Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro to Hulu’s reimagining of The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, and all the young adult dystopias in between, one does not have to search far to find a unique dystopian read. While every dystopia is different, these novels have similar characteristics that define their genre.
Many lives could be saved if half of the effort of cloning a human was put forth in feeding the hungry, clothing the cold or educating the under privileged.
At Hailsham the students were sheltered from the truth about donations. Donations aren’t brought directly to the students’ attention until the students are fifteen years old and in their last year at Hailsham (Ishiguro 79). Miss Lucy becomes agitated by two students discussing their dreams for their futures and tells all of the students that none of them will live any of their dreams and that they'll all become organ donors (Ishiguro 80-81). Miss Lucy says, “ You've been told and not told… your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old… you'll start to donate your vital organs” (Ishiguro 81). The shock of actually being told the truth causes some of the students to completely block out or reject Miss Lucy’s
Human Cloning could be found as unethical to many people. In “The Question of Human Cloning.”, John A. Robertson addresses the hypothetical scenario of cloned human embryos being put up for sale (2). This would inevitably stop inherent uniqueness and dignity of individuals and create unrealistic parent expectations for their children; these embryos would be created and sold for genetic desirability. There is also the concern of cloned embryos used for future “spare parts” (Elmer-Dewitt, 3). Cloned embryos could be born just for the use of being used to give things needed by someone else; for example if someone was to need a heart transplant a cloned embryo could be born and they would use the heart of the clone, but if clones were to be seen as any other human would that be considered the murder of an innocent life. In “Cloning Where do we Draw the Line.” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt
They spend most of their life with the idea that this is normal, and this is what they are made to do. Due to the fact that they have been raised with this mindset they have no outside perspective on how people outside of Hailsham live their lives. Without any idea of how other people live their lives, they may have no problem knowing that this is their fate, because they don’t have any idea of what they could be doing with their lives if they didn’t have these restrictions. “I can see ..that it might look as though you are simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world.”(Ishiguro, 266) The guardians at Hailsham treated the children as regular people to give them the most normal life possible, by reassuring the children that their situation could be seen in a positive light the children would become accustomed to the idea that there was nothing they could do to change their fate and ultimately decide to view their situation as a good thing. Nobody bothered to try to change things, because they didn’t believe there was anything wrong that needed to be
A dystopia the darkest form of government, a utopia gone wrong, a craving for power, struggling for fewer rules. The dystopia is factual the worst possible form of a government. Its the struggle to be so perfect that it fails. There are typically two types of dystopias first a monarchy. A monarchy is a group of people controlled by a king or queen, and they make every last decision. What they want they get. A monarchy is typically born like this example from lord of the flies. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them"(Golding 58). This shows that a monarchy starts by one just taking over from the start rather than being a
Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go In Kazuo Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go, it portrays clones being stripped of their human identity in a dystopian society. The novel is a representation of the complexity of humanity. The clone’s special purpose is to donate their organs to “real” humans.
Another supplementary argument can be made on the topic of medical advancements made possible through the cloning process, mankind will be provided with organs and cells with which human’s lives will be saved. If a person needs an organ transplant the normal means of transplantation would involve the removal of an organ from another person. This organ could be rejected and many complications could arise, often with deadly repercussions. Human cloning would involve using the person’s own cells that could be cloned to produce a healthy, normal organ for use in the person. Through this process, there would be no
Kazuo Ishiguro writes about a dystopian world of clones that are made to donate their organs, in his book ‘Never Let Me Go.’ I enjoy dystopian novels a lot and of course everyone has their own opinion. Personally I like a happy ending, which to me, this book did not have. The main problem was that all of the characters lacked the ability to say no to the people in charge, whoever they may have been. At first I thought it was only Kathy, but as I read more about it, I realized it was most of the people at this time. They all gave into social conformity following mindlessly, and acting how they were taught. This is a perfect example of a dystopian world, however I would have liked to see a change. I noticed many times where a character could have done something to change the outcome of the story and did not take it. We have Madame, Miss Emily, Kathy, and Tommy, all of which had the opportunity to change the life of the clones. Instead they all just continued listening to
dystopian communities, there is always some form of suffering occurring. A dystopia never benefits society as a whole and will provide nightmares for those who do not benefit. A civilization following dystopian characteristics involve illusions of prosperity, people being singled out, and a strong sense of corruption. Dystopian civilizations are full of suffering whether it be covered up, out in the open, or even done in a ceremonious nature.