Cloning movie is more fiction than science

COLLEGE PARK, MD (JULY 21, 2005)--At one time or another everyone wishes that there were two of them so that they could be in two places at once or get twice as many things done. Think about the possibilities of having your own clone -- a genetic copy of you. If your liver became diseased and you needed an organ transplant, your clone could donate the perfect match of your liver with no risk of rejection. The idea might sound great, but imagine waking up one day and discovering that you were the clone, just biding time until your “sponsor” needed you.

This is the premise behind the movie The Island, opening in theaters nationwide June 22. Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are living in a futuristic utopian facility, because the Earth has been contaminated. Everyone at the facility anxiously lines up in anticipation of the weekly lottery drawing to be picked to go to The Island, which is the last place on Earth free of contamination. Lincoln Six-Echo soon learns that he is one of thousands of harvest clones -- and that being picked to go to The Island isn’t a vacation: instead it means that their “sponsors” are ready to harvest them for the organs they need.

“The premise of The Island would never happen in real life,” says Dr. Suzanne Holland, a bioethicist at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Wash. “Right now, cloning is expensive, inefficient, and unsafe, but if it ever becomes cheap, efficient, and safe, then, we might have reason to worry. But for now, it is a long way off.”

In the movie, clones are created through methods similar to actual reproductive cloning. Reproductive cloning creates an animal with the same DNA as the original animal. For example, Dolly the sheep was created by British researchers in 1996 using reproductive cloning. Geneticists insert DNA into an egg which has had its DNA removed. The egg is treated with chemicals or an electric current to trigger the cells to divide. Once the embryo reaches an appropriate stage, it is transferred into a female’s uterus until birth.

The movie’s creation of clones combines the ideas of reproductive cloning with therapeutic cloning. In therapeutic cloning, human embryos are grown to harvest stem cells. Stem cells can be used to generate any kind of cell in the human body, for example, skin, heart, and liver cells. Once an egg has divided for five days, stem cells can be extracted. This destroys the embryo, which is one of the ethical concerns of this process, but experts say that this type of cloning has the potential to be useful for organ transplants.

In the movie, DNA is taken from a donor, and in a year, the clone is grown to the age of the donor. So in the movie, a 30-year-old donor could get a 30-year old clone in just 12 months. This can't happen in the real world. A clone is a twin, separated in time. Just as identical twins share DNA when the fertilized egg divides into two separate bodies, a clone uses the exact same DNA as its original and develops at the same rate.

The movie shows that just like people have their reasons for having controversial procedures such as abortion or plastic surgery, there are people on The Island who have their reasons for creating a clone. Some are for medical reasons and some are for selfish reasons. The movie does touch on the ethical issues raised by cloning and some of the issues come from possibilities that science hasn’t discovered yet.

"The big issues we'll face over the next decade or two won't involve cloning whole human beings, but organs and tissue," says Dr. Patrick Derr, an expert in medical ethics and health policy at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. "Veterinary research on things like fractional embryo fusion may open doors we can barely imagine, and raise deep issues about justice and equal access."

As we watch Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta attempt to escape their harvest fate, we’ll know that science still has a long road ahead, with many scientific and ethical issues that need to be addressed, but there is also much possibility.

Rated PG –13
Inside Science's Science Rating: 2 stars

More information

For Dr. Suzanne Holland
Contact - Melissa Rohlfs
Media Relations Manager
University of Puget Sound
Tacoma, WA
253.879.2611
mediarelations@ups.edu

Dr. Patrick Derr
Philosophy, Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Clark University
Worcester, MA
508.793.7128
pderr@clarku.edu

Emilie Lorditch
American Institute of Physics
College Park, MD
301-209-3029
elorditc@aip.org

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