Kazuo Ishiguro's 2009 novel, Never Let Me Go , is a dystopia of impressive subtlety. It forgoes the usual scientific folderol that often characterizes the genre, seen for example in Brave New World. Yet the world it imagines is none the less disturbing. It is peopled by child clones, grown to provide organs when they mature to adulthood, and who long to find their 'model' or matching recipient. Unnecessarily, it seems, these children are authentically emotional and creative—their art is collected by their guardians as evidence they possess souls.
Their peculiar environment is gradually seen to map very closely onto another: that of the traditional English boarding school. Here, too, pupils miss their parents, they learn and create. Suddenly, we are made to realize that our world is not so different from the clone farm. Isn't this what we do as parents—create replacement organs? We too in effect sacrifice our bodies (through the more enjoyable method of sexual intercourse) to create the next generation, and all else we can leave behind is evidence of our creativity. The clones' education is clearly superfluous, even pointless, because their only purpose is to provide tissue for future humans. But then—and this is the deeper paradox of the story – isn't our own education likewise ultimately pointless?
If the idea of cloning humans so that replacement organs may be harvested from them is unsettling, then so too is the idea of transplanting parts and organs from animals, which is part of current medical practice. Organs from human donors may raise fears in the recipient that they will acquire some characteristics of the donor. This is why we feel queasier about the possibility of brain transplants than we do about heart transplants, for example. But xenotransplantation raises an older set of fears and possibilities.
Stories of the transformation of persons into animals are some of the oldest and best stories we have. The Roman poet Ovid collected and retold many of these in his Metamorphoses. Such ancient tales reflect humankind's awareness of the natural world, and a sense of blending with it that is now largely lost. But the stories really speak to us because they center on identity. The tales of animal and other transformations in Ovid can be read as attempts to understand what we now recognize as changes in psychological behavior. These changes may be odd and inexplicable, but so at the time were many of the changes and transformations observed in nature, which became obvious analogies.
Our body is inevitably the locus of our personal identity. So what better way to express an unexplainable change in identity by a fantastic transformation of the body? A severe birth deformity might once have been comprehended in this way, as in Hindu mythology where Shiva and Parvati conceive Ganesha, who is a giant. Shiva beheads Ganesha who is then restored to life with the head of an elephant. Similarly, in medieval stories of werewolves, for example, it is important to the meaning that the transformed person retains aspects of human behavior. This is often outwardly indicated by the wolf's having human eyes.
How does this cultural history color our perceptions of xenotransplantation? In the past, altered behavior was rationalized by stories of physical species transformation. Now, the physical transformation is internal, the tables are turned, and the fear is that the change will be expressed in behavior. Such was the case with transplants of baboon hearts into humans. The recipient's apprehension was that they might start to imitate ape behavior.
Pigs are a slightly different case. Xenotransplant patients do not worry about behaving like a pig in the same way when they receive valves from a pig's heart. But pigs raise other dilemmas. The medical profession prefers pigs for transplants because the organ sizes correspond closely with human ones and, more particularly perhaps, because they can be bred cheaply and without occasioning much ethical controversy, because they are already bred for food. But religious and cultural tradition paints the pig in an unflattering light. The twelfth-century Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux reasoned that the pig is unclean because its flesh becomes 'one flesh' with ours, for example in the case of gluttons, whose behavior is seen as piggish, as well as sinful and influenced by the devil. The trouble is that this is just what surgery requires: in order for the transplant to succeed, the body's immunosuppression mechanisms must be convinced that indeed 'one flesh' is what is present.
We seem to have retained only the downside of these great fables of human–animal transformation. We have the discomfort with the idea of animal parts and animal-like characteristics because of the distance we have put between ourselves and the animal world. But we have lost another important aspect of these stories: the wonderful powers of mental transformation that come from being able to sample life as another species.
