Never Let Me Go: the organ donation debate

To live, someone else must die. To ensure there are enough spare parts to go around, the government must breed people to provide organs for others. That is the crux of the new British movie Never Let Me Go. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel, the film's imminent public release comes at a time of renewed debates about organ donation.

The movie will hit cinemas this month amidst calls in the UK for the Government to consider the merits of a legalised market in organs for transplant. This debate comes at the same time as Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks ruled that brain stem death does not permit heart and lung donations.

Starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, Never Let Me Go is a love triangle about clones created in a laboratory and raised in order to provide their organs to severely ill patients.

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 a gestational carrier.

Such commercial surrogacy illustrates what ethicist Margaret 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. And such issues might be closer to us than most of us realize." (themark.com, Nov 25, 2010)

According to The Independent on Sunday, the "superb" film adaptation of Ishiguro's literary novel, which opens in British cinemas in February, 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 points out that the soon to be released movie depicts "a morally compromised world not unlike our own." Where are medical and ethical watchdogs making sure that the use of people's bodies as depicted in books (and the subsequent movies) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Never Let Me Go do not come to pass?

It appears that yet again, it is the fiction writers who are the whistleblowers for society's worst excesses. Atwood's book has been cited more than 5000 times on the internet in response to Kidman's use of a gestational carrier. Will this be the case for Ishiguro, now that medical technology has all but caught up with his novel at the same time as the movie of his book is to be released?
The UK, like Australia and most western countries, suffers from a decline in organ donation – Canada has the lowest rates. Professor John Harris, an ethicist at the University of Manchester, believes a debate and the introduction of an organ market are long overdue. Opponents say that disadvantaged people would end up selling parts of their bodies, potentially with disregard for the risks involved. (The Independent on Sunday, Jan 5)

Despite the enormous publicity surrounding organ donation in Australia following the death of sporting identity David Hookes in 2004, organ donation is now on the decline again. While various theories have been put forward for this reason – everything from apathy to ignorance – I believe that the age old desire to be buried whole is a powerful unconscious reason people turn away from signing up for organ donation.

Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in 1817, had a profound attachment to body parts in real life as well as fiction. When she died in 1851, her husband's heart was found amongst her belongings. It was reported to be wrapped in one of the sheets of "Adonais"- Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous elegy to Keats. She kept it in a desk drawer, after his untimely demise in a boating accident.

The Ancient Egyptians perfected elaborate mummification techniques and stored organs in canopic jars around the body, because the body needed to be intact to be resurrected again in the next life. There is the myth of Isis, who reassembles the fragments of her murdered lover, and for the first time in history performs the rights of embalmment which restores the murdered god to eternal life.

Although the modern history of transplantation is relatively short, the concept of a monster created by adding one part of a body to another predates Frankenstein and can be found in history's oldest myths. With many countries approving clinical trials of xenotransplantation, the day when cross species organ transplantation is common place may be closer than we think.

One thing is for certain; no matter if ethicists fail to rise to the occasion, fiction writers will poke at this scab until it bleeds.

ENDS

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