While certain elements of Godsend feel as though they’ve been ripped from recent headlines, the genesis of the project was more intimate, emanating from screenwriter Mark Bomback’s personal experience. “I first came up with the idea about the time my wife was pregnant with our son,” he says, “And I was struck by how much technology is involved today in fertility. We needed a little bit of help — not as much as some others do — and we were amazed by how far science has come in the past 20 years.”
Bomback himself comes from a family of doctors. His father is a pediatrician who, as an undergraduate, conducted some research in genetics. One of his brothers is a doctor and another is in medical school. The concept of cell research and cloning was not foreign to him. Says Bomback, “This whole topic has really exploded in the past few years. There is exponentially more research material that’s become available since I first started the script. Over the past few years major studies and articles about cloning and stem cell research have been appearing with increasing regularity.”
At this time, Godsend is speculative about the use of science to clone a human being, but the science itself is grounded in fact. Dolly the sheep, widely acknowledged to be the world’s first cloned mammal is the theoretical template for Godsend’s Adam. Dr. Ian Wimott, the Scottish research scientist who created Dolly, proposed that his process was a feasible way in which any mammal could be cloned. Director Nick Hamm saw that the characters, their fears, and in turn, their terrifying experience, not the issue of cloning technology was at the heart of the movie. “We don’t treat cloning in a pseudo-scientific way, or supply the film with a futuristic setting which is un-relatable to most people. We set it here and now, right into people’s lives. The point is, if you have the ability to do this, what would you do?”
The dark side of that question gives rise to the issues that haunt Godsend: Ethics, morality, and legality are all taken into consideration by the emotionally devastated Duncans as they frantically debate Dr. Wells’ proposition. Producer Michael Paseornek adds the frightening question: “When you get into cloning human beings, what do you do with the ones that don’t work out?”
This question, and the myriad questions like it that have been precipitated by the rapid advances of science in the last few years and, specifically, sparked by the recent national debate over stem cell research, have created a change in the way our society and our government has come to deal with issues of bio-ethics. Indeed, in August 2001, President Bush created the President’s Council on Bio-ethics, chaired by Dr. Leon Kass. But as Dr. Kass pointed out in his opening remarks to the Council in January 2002, the events of September 11th created “a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness” and utterly changed the way people thought about issues of life and death.
In his remarks, Dr. Kass continued, “A fresh breeze of sensible moral judgment…has enabled us to see evil for what it is, and…it has been a long time since the climate and mood of the country was this hospitable for serious moral reflection.” Kass goes on to say that “In the case of terrorism…it is easy to identify evil…but in the realm of bio-ethics, the evils we face, if indeed they are evils, are intertwined with the goods we so keenly seek: cures for disease, relief of suffering, preservation of life. Distinguishing good and bad thus intermixed is often extremely difficult.”
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