Rebel scientist using tissue from dead children to attempt to clone them again for their bereaved parents

Life imitates art. Art imitates life. “Godsend“,  a movie opening August 17th, starring Robert de Niro as a doctor who clones children for parents who have lost a child due to early accidents or other loss, has a real-life equivalent. Or so says the man in question – Doctor Panos Zavos.

Quoting from a news.scotsman.com article:

 Doctor Panos Zavos injected cows’ eggs with the genetic material to create cloned hybrid embryos.

 At a news conference in London yesterday, he claimed the achievement was a major step forward, paving the way to creating cloned babies from dead tissue.

 One of the “donors” was an 11-year-old girl, Katy, killed in a car crash. Another was an 18-month-old boy who died after surgery, and the third a 33-year-old man thought to have died after a road accident. In each case relatives contacted Dr Zavos’s team at the Centre For Reproductive Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky.

I am intrigued by this because:

• while countries and the international community will try to ban it, people will still try to do it;
• it points to our continued lack of mechanisms for meaningful global discourse on these subjects;
• the “GodSend” film production company, our very own Lions Gate Films, set up a website which is set up to look like a functioning cloning institute in the U.S. Their 800-number is receiving  several hundred calls PER DAY from people who are unhappy about the idea of the clinic and who are calling to complain;