From the issue dated May 28, 2004
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'Godsend'
WHAT IT IS: A horror film about parents whose 8-year-old son, Adam, dies in an accident and is reborn as a clone at the hand of a domineering geneticist, played by Robert De Niro. (Warning: This interview reveals a significant plot twist.) OUR EXPERT: Gregory B. Stock, a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health and author of Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our Future (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). *** In the movie: The geneticist, using a cell from the deceased child, assures the parents that he can pull off the procedure flawlessly. Fact or fiction: "Already there are doctors saying those sorts of things in order to attract couples to try to attempt a cloning. But that doesn't mean it's true. Cloning has never been done in primates at all, and the frequency of problems in other mammals is quite high. ... Eventually it will be feasible in humans, given lots and lots of eggs to start with. As to how many embryos it would take to get a child and as to whether there would be problems with the offspring, who knows?" *** In the movie: The cloned child suffers violent hallucinations because his cells have retained memories from his former life. Fact or fiction: "That's total garbage. ... The idea that memory is transferred at a cellular level and could somehow be carried through from one individual to another this way makes no sense whatsoever, because we develop our memories as a result of our experiences. Specific memories are a reflection of patterning in the brain that doesn't feed back into genetics at all. *** In the movie: The new Adam's evil streak turns out to be a result of the geneticist's having spliced in a few personality genes from his own dead son. Fact or fiction: "Temperament and personality have a significant genetic component, but they're definitely not determined by single genes. It's very, very complex how constellations of genes would manifest themselves in this realm, and the idea of sort of patching together an individual in that way doesn't make any sense. ... Personality is a combination of genetics and environmental influences, so the idea of re-creating precise behavioral patterns this way is silly." http://chronicle.com Section: Short Subjects Volume 50, Issue 38, Page A8 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education