{"id":3987,"date":"2024-09-14T18:18:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T18:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3987"},"modified":"2024-09-25T18:27:37","modified_gmt":"2024-09-25T18:27:37","slug":"doing-an-elizabeth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3987","title":{"rendered":"Doing an Elizabeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance inspired this Telegraph article about copies and clones<\/a><\/p>\n

Hollywood has-been Elisabeth Sparkle didn\u2019t look where she was going, and got badly shaken about in a traffic accident. Now she\u2019s in the emergency room, and an unfeasibly handsome young male nurse is running his fingers down her spine. Nothing\u2019s wrong. On the contrary: Elisabeth (played by Demi Moore) is, she\u2019s told, \u201ca perfect candidate\u201d.<\/p>\n

The next day she gets a box through the post. Inside is a kit that will enable her to duplicate herself. The instructions couldn\u2019t be clearer. Even when fully separated, Elisabeth and the younger, better version of herself who\u2019s just spilled amniotically out of her back (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) are one. While one of them gets to play in the sun for a week, the other must lie in semi-coma, feeding off an intravenous drip. Each week, they swap roles.<\/p>\n

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat\u2019s script for The Substance is one of those super-lucid cinematic fun-rides that can\u2019t help but put you in mind of other, admittedly rather better movies. In Joe Mankiewicz\u2019s All About Eve (1950), an actress\u2019s personal assistant plots to steal her career. In John Frankenheimer\u2019s Seconds (1966), Rock Hudson gets his youth back and quickly learns to hate it. In David Cronenberg\u2019s The Fly (1986) biologist Seth Brundle\u2019s experiment in gene splicing is a none-too-subtle metaphor for the ageing process.<\/p>\n

Recently, I ran into a biotechnology company called StoreGene. They sent me a blood sample kit in a little box and promised me a lifetime of personalised medicine, so long as I let them read my entire genetic code.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m older than Elisabeth Sparkle (sacked from her daytime TV fitness show on her 50th birthday) and a sight less fit than Demi Moore, and so I seized StoreGene\u2019s offer with both palsied, liver-spotted hands.<\/p>\n

Now, somewhere in what we call the Cloud (some anonymous data centre outside Chicago, more like) I have a double. Unlike Elizabeth\u2019s Sue, though, my double won\u2019t resent the fact that I am using him as a means. He is not going to flinch, or feel violated in any way, as his virtual self is put through trial after trial.<\/p>\n

Every year, more than a million medical research papers are published. It\u2019s impossible to know what this deluge of new discovery means to me personally \u2013 but now my GP can find out, at the push of a button, what it means for my genetic data-double.<\/p>\n

Should I take this medicine, or that? Should I take more of it, or less of it? What treatment will work; what won\u2019t? No more uncertainty for me: now I am guaranteed to receive treatments that are tailored to me, forever. I\u2019ve just landed, bang, in the middle of a new era of personalised medicine.<\/p>\n

Now that there\u2019s a digital clone of me floating around, I have even less reason to want to \u201cdo an Elisabeth\u201d and make a flesh-and-blood copy of myself. This will come as a relief to anyone who\u2019s read Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, and can\u2019t shake off the horror occasioned by that school assembly: \u201cIf you\u2019re going to have decent lives,\u201d Miss Lucy tells the children in her care, \u201cthen you\u2019ve got to know and know properly\u2026 You\u2019ll become adults, then before you\u2019re old, before you\u2019re even middle-aged, you\u2019ll start to donate your vital organs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Might we one day farm clones of ourselves to provide our ageing, misused bodies with spare parts? This is by far the best of the straw-man arguments that have been mounted over the years against the idea of human cloning. (Most of the others involve Hitler.)<\/p>\n

It at least focuses our minds on a key ethical question: are we ever entitled to use other people as means to an end? But it\u2019s still a straw-man argument, not least because we\u2019re a long way into figuring out how to grow our spare organs in other animals. No ethical worries there! (though the pigs may disagree).<\/p>\n

And while such xenotransplantation and other technologies advance by leaps and bounds, reproductive cloning languishes \u2013 a rather baroque solution to biomedical problems solved more easily by other means.<\/p>\n

Famously, In 1996 Ian Wilmut and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Scotland successfully cloned Dolly the sheep from the udder cells of a ewe. Dolly was their 277th attempt. She died young. No-one can really say whether this had anything to do with her being a clone, since her creation conspicuously did not open the floodgates to further experimentation. Two decades went by before the first primates were successfully cloned \u2013 two crab-eating macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. These days it\u2019s possible to clone your pet (Barbara Streisand famously cloned her dog), but my strong advice is, don\u2019t bother: around 96 per cent of all cloning attempts end in failure.<\/p>\n

Science-fiction stories, from Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World (1932) to Andrew Niccol\u2019s Gattaca (1997), have conjured up hyper-utilitarian nightmares in which manipulations of the human genome work all too well. This is what made David Cronenberg\u2019s early body horror so compelling and, in retrospect, so visionary: in films such as 1977\u2019s Rabid (a biker develops a blood-sucking orifice) and 1979\u2019s The Brood (ectopic pregnancies manifest a divorc\u00e9e\u2019s rage), the body doesn\u2019t give a stuff about anyone\u2019s PhD; it has its own ideas about what it wants to be.<\/p>\n

And so it has proved. Not only does cloning rarely succeed; the clone that manages to survive to term will most likely be deformed, or die of cancer, or keel over for some other more or less mysterious reason. After cloning Dolly the sheep, Wilmut and his team tried to clone another lamb; it hyperventilated so much it kept passing out.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It is conceivable, I suppose, that hundreds of years from now, alien intelligences will dust off StoreGene\u2019s recording of my genome and, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, set about growing a copy of me in a modishly lit plexiglass tank. Much good may it do them: the clone they\u2019re growing will bear only a passing physical resemblance to me, and he and I will share only the very broadest psychological and emotional similarity. Genes make a big contribution to the development process, but they\u2019re not in overall charge of it. Even identical twins, nature\u2019s own clones, are easy to tell apart, especially when they start speaking.<\/p>\n

Call me naive, but I\u2019m not too worried about vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects, alien or otherwise, getting hold of my genetic data. It\u2019s the thought of what all my other data may be up to that keeps me up at night.<\/p>\n

Swedish political scientist Carl \u00d6hman\u2019s The Afterlife of Data, published earlier this year, recounts the experiences of a young man who, having lost his father ten years previously, finds that they can still compete against each other on an old XBox racing game. That is, he can play against his father\u2019s saved games, again and again. (Of course he\u2019s now living in dread of the day the XBox eventually breaks and his dad dies a second time.)<\/p>\n

The digital world has been part of our lives for most of our lives, if not all of them. We are each of us mirrored there. And there\u2019s this in common between exploring digital technology and exploring the Moon: no wind will come along to blow away our footprints.<\/p>\n

\u00d6hman\u2019s book is mostly an exploration of the unstable but fast-growing sector of \u201cgrieving technologies\u201d which create \u2013 from our digital footprints \u2013 chatbots, which our grieving loved ones can interrogate on those long lonely winter evenings. Rather more uncanny, to my mind, are those chatbots of us that stalk the internet while we\u2019re still alive, causing trouble on our behalf. How long will it be before my wife starts ringing me up out of the blue to ask me the PIN for our joint debit card?<\/p>\n

Answer: in no time at all, at least according to a note on \u201chuman machine teaming\u201d published six (six!) years ago by the Ministry of Defence. Its prediction that \u201cforgeries are likely to constitute a large proportion of online content\u201d was stuffily phrased, but accurate enough: in 2023 nearly half of all internet traffic came from bots.<\/p>\n

At what point does a picture of yourself acquire its own reality? At what point does that picture\u2019s existence start ruining your life? Oscar Wilde took a stab at what in 1891 must have seemed a very noodly question with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 130-odd years later, Sarah Snook\u2019s one-woman take on the story at London\u2019s Haymarket Theatre employed digital beauty filters and mutiple screens in what felt less like an updating of Wilde\u2019s story, more its apocalyptic restatement: all lives end, and a life wholly given over to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure is not going to end well.<\/p>\n

In 2021, users of TikTok noticed that the platform\u2019s default front-facing camera was slimming down their faces, smoothing their skin, whitening their teeth and altering the size of their eyes and noses. (You couldn\u2019t disable this feature, either.) When you play with these apps, you begin to appreciate their uncanny pull. I remember the first time TikTok\u2019s \u201cBold Glamour\u201d filter, released last year, mapped itself over my image with an absolute seamlessness. Quite simply, a better me appeared in the phone\u2019s digital mirror. When I gurned, it gurned. When I laughed, it laughed. It had me fixated for days and, for heaven\u2019s sake, I\u2019m a middle-aged bloke. Girls, you\u2019re the target audience here. If you want to know what your better selves are up to, all you have to do is look into your smartphone.<\/p>\n

Better yet, head to a clinic near you (while there are still appointments available), get your fill of fillers, and while your face is swelling like an Aardman Animations outtake, listen in as practitioners of variable experience and capacity talk glibly of \u201cZoom-face dysphoria\u201d.
\nThat this self-transfiguring trend has disfigured a generation is not really the worry. The Kardashian visage (tan by Baywatch, brows and eye shape by Bollywood, lips from Atlanta, cheeks from Pocahontas, nose from Gwyneth Paltrow) is a mostly non-surgical artefact \u2013 a hyaluronic-acid trip that will melt away in six months to a year, once people come to their senses. What really matters is that among school-age girls, rates of depression and self-harm are through the roof. I had a whale of a time at that screening of The Substance. But the terrifying reality is that the film isn\u2019t for me; it\u2019s for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance inspired this Telegraph article about copies and clones Hollywood has-been Elisabeth Sparkle didn\u2019t look where she was going, and got badly shaken about in a traffic accident. Now she\u2019s in the emergency room, and an unfeasibly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[1185,745,763,86,267],"class_list":["post-3987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-body-dysmorphia","tag-clones","tag-genetics","tag-science-fiction","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3988,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3987\/revisions\/3988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}