Introducing: The Book Club - Never Let Me Go

0:05Dominic Sanbrook:Hello, it's Hannah here. And Michael. And welcome to The Rest is Science. And today we're doing something a little bit different because we are here with Dominic Sanbrook of Rest is History fame. Dominic, welcome to our side of the fence.

0:19Hannah:Thank you very much. It's lovely to be on a properly professional podcast for once. One where the presenters actually know what they're talking about. This is an absolute first for me. So it's very exciting.

0:28Dominic Sanbrook:Dominic, I love bringing literature into the lab. Would you consider this podcast a lab, Hannah? Sure. It's a lab of the mind. It's an ideal lab, at least. But Dominic, you've got a new show out that's called The Book Club. And so I wanted to hear about it. And I wanted to talk to you because I love books as well.

0:45Hannah:Amazing. We all love books. We can have a lovely relationship. So, yes, I do a podcast called The Rest is History normally. And a long-serving producer on The Rest is History, Tabitha. And I would often talk about books when we're on tour and when we're preparing the shows and stuff. And we did a mini series for our Rest is History club members, our subscribers, all about books. So we looked at The Hobbit and we looked at Dracula and some kind of great classics. Anyway, those went down quite well. So we decided to launch it as a standalone show. And actually, our second episode is a book partly about science.

1:22Hannah:So it's a book called Never Let Me Go by Kazuyo Ishiguro. So it's a book in which it turns out, this is a massive spoiler, by the way, so your listeners should prepare themselves. So the narrator is one of a group of children who have effectively been created as clones to be organ donors. And so the book is asking deep questions about what it is to be human and what it is to be a clone and all of this kind of thing.

1:49Dominic Sanbrook:Do they know that they've been created for that purpose?

1:51Hannah:When it starts, it looks like Kazuo Ishiguro has written a kind of classic British boarding school story. And quite early on, so it's not a colossal spoiler, there is a moment when they're talking about what they're going to do when they grow up. And some of the kids are saying they want to go to Hollywood. You know, some of the boys, they want to become actors. and their teacher who is not a clone kind of loses patience with them and says this is not right that you're having this conversation it's not right that you haven't been told or she says this line which i think is is is so true because it's how we we learn about our own mortality for example she says to the kids it's not right because you've been told and not told it's been allowed to kind of seep in but you have no one has really sat you down and had this blunt conversation with you that you will never go to Hollywood you will never have a job you will never have a normal life you have been bred for a purpose of giving your organs to other to human beings and you are not effectively you are not fully human and of course this is the funny thing is it's kind of a shock for these kids but at the same time they react as 13 year olds always do when a teacher sits them down and wants to give them a lecture about their health or sex education or their own mortality.

3:07Hannah:They're a bit embarrassed and a bit bored of the conversation. And so it's really, really brilliantly handled. And the rest of the book is about how these characters cope with the reality of the fact that they are clones and that other people don't regard them as human, and that their lives are going to be shortened, that they're going to have to give up their organs for donation, and then they'll be dead.

3:28Dominic Sanbrook:So they're clones of the people who will need these organs in the future. That way it's a perfect match.

3:35Hannah:We never really know how they have been created, but they come to believe, some of them themselves, that they've been made from, as it were, the losers of society. So there's a bit where they're having an argument, and one of them says to the others, you know what we are? We're trash. That's the quote from the book. We are winos, we are prostitutes, we are criminals, we are all of these kinds of things. And that's, those were our models. And that's what we've been created from. And we are basically, we're just organ donors. That's all we are. And it's a really troubling idea. But how did you pick this book?

4:13Hannah:It is an incredibly haunting, troubling book about nostalgia, about melancholy. There's lots of themes. It's not just the science element. There's lots of these kinds of themes to it. But actually, like a lot of Ishiguro's books, and like a lot of science fiction books, actually, going back to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's book, which is another book that we're doing on the show. It's a book that asks, what is it? What does it mean to be human and to kind of confront your own mortality? Like, what do you do with the time that is given to you? So one of the questions we talk about in the show is, it's one of the things that critics actually leveled at the book.

4:46Hannah:They said, why don't they run away? Why don't they go mad knowing that this is their reality? And Tabitha, my co-presenter, and I were having this conversation. And I said, yeah, but you and I are going to die. And, you know, that that moment is faster, is approaching more quickly than we would like. And yet we haven't run away. We haven't gone mad. We're actually doing this podcast. That's what we're choosing to do with the limited time that we've been given. And that's the question that ultimately we all have to face, isn't it? When we contemplate our own very short time on this planet, that that's what do we do with the time that's given to us?

5:19Dominic Sanbrook:I'm so intrigued by something that you said there that these people aren't considered as fully human or they don't see themselves as fully human Why is that? I mean presumably they are a full human form

5:32Hannah:Of course, yeah So and as we discover they believe that they have emotions just as valuable as any humans and they believe that they have souls It's really important to them that they have souls And there's a group of people who are trying to prove that the clones have souls they get them to do artworks and they collect their art and they want to basically say you know they are able to express themselves artistically and that's one of the attributes of being human um why wouldn't people think of them as human well you guys are the science experts do you not think that if we were to clone human beings as organ donors one of the ways that we would cope with it and the moral implications is we would tell ourselves they're not really human beings like us.

6:15Hannah:I mean, this is what people always say, this is the theme of Blade Runner, Orinty Frankenstein, or all these kinds of things.

6:21Dominic Sanbrook:I mean, I think if you take that logic and start applying it more loosely, then you would say that only one twin, only one of two identical twins gets to be considered the human. Twins are clones of each other. So which one got the soul and which one didn't? Surely the first one out, the first one out always wins. Yeah, psychologically and historically, it's been very common to say, you know what? These people were exploiting. They're not really fully people, so it's not that bad. And then when the pope says, actually, you can save their souls, they go, oh, crud. OK, they've got a soul. What do we do about this?

6:57Dominic Sanbrook:So is that why they're clones then? The hope would be that they could be exploited for their organs without guilt? Yes. Because why wouldn't you just breed a bunch of humans? After all, if I wanted organs, I would want them to come from the cream of the crop of society, not the trash.

7:14Hannah:So you're asking the difficult questions that really, I mean, just to be clear, I'm not Kazuo Ishiguro and I therefore cannot. And I think he would say his book is a metaphor rather than a serious investigation of what a future with cloning would look like. I mean, sure. I still want Michael Phelps's lungs, you know? Yeah, okay, fair enough.

7:35Dominic Sanbrook:I think you're being very hard on these kids' lungs. I think they're good lungs. You know what? I would like Albert Einstein's spleen. Would you? It'd be a funny story to tell people. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I got an organ from Albert Einstein. They're like, that's why you're so smart. And I'm like, no, I got his spleen.

7:51Hannah:What would you take, Hannah, if you could have the organ of anybody from history?

7:54Dominic Sanbrook:The organ of anyone from history? Oh, I don't know. The courage of Joan of Arc. There you go. The courage. That's not an organ. A courage organ. Yeah, that's not an organ. You put me on the spot. My biology is weak. I've exposed myself.

8:09Hannah:I'd have Nelson's liver. That's what I'd do.

8:12Dominic Sanbrook:Fair. I'm sure he could take it. You know what you could do, Hannah, is you could ask for the guts of Joan of Arc. Nice. There you go. See? You know, the thing is also, Dominic, a lot of this is actually possible. You know this. Like you could probably do this with humans. People thought you couldn't clone any primates in particular for a really long time. and then some people managed to clone some macaques and it's all it's all gone so the only reason why why this it's not a scientific reason that has stopping this from happening it's much

8:43Hannah:more of an ethical one it's just ethical because Ishiguro got the inspiration for his book from Dolly the sheep that was cloned in the 1990s and I've often wondered why if you can clone a sheep you can't clone a human being but then of course that causes you know if they cloned another Hannah Fry, which one is the real one? Would you be happy to die knowing that Hannah Fry, the other one lived on? I mean, obviously not. Surely. I'd consider her my nemesis and do everything I could

9:10Dominic Sanbrook:to take her down. Of course you would. You'd do everything to undermine that person, wouldn't you? I want to say it really depends on how the cloning happens. Like to clone her today, we would wind up with a newborn Hannah Fry twin. Because twins, which naturally happen all the time are clones. They have the exact same DNA as each other. If we wanted to make an adult Hannah Fry clone that's the same age as the one we're talking to right now, we don't know how to do that. We'd have to make a baby. We'd say it has the same DNA. It's going to have completely different life experiences. It's going to grow up with different technology.

9:42Dominic Sanbrook:Even if we had her parents raise it, her parents are different now than they were when she was a child. So it would wind up quite different. This is what confused me as a kid when Dolly was cloned. The little magazine we all had to read in school about it had a picture of two adult sheep that looked the same, but they were clearly just this one image mirrored. And we were like, no, no, this is exactly the same image, just mirrored. And the teacher didn't understand that they'd actually created a baby of Dolly.

10:08Hannah:Yeah. Well, this raises the question, doesn't it? What are you? What makes you you? Is it your DNA and all that stuff? Or is it the sum of your memories and your life experiences? And I think most of us instinctively would say it's the latter, that a Hannah Fry with different memories is not the real Hannah Fry.

10:24Dominic Sanbrook:Well, so if Hannah had a head injury and suffered from amnesia, is she now a different person? That's a major problem for people who are amnesic. They wake up, they're told, here's your wife, here's your job. And they're like, oh, I don't get to choose. Like, wait, but who am I? There's also some ideas about the memory when you do clone something that there's there's some lingering memory that gets transported i mean we were talking about bamboo the other day on our show and bamboo as you clone it it sort of retains this kind of internal genetic clock so bamboo it it's very dramatic right it sort of flowers and then dies it takes about 100 100 years or so for it to happen and there was one particular very beautiful fountain spray bamboo that um some russian explorer found in the mountains of china took it back to St.

11:18Dominic Sanbrook:Petersburg. It got cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned until it was all over Europe. But it retained this memory, the clock of when it was going to flower and die. And so there was basically an apocalypse, a bamboo apocalypse across all of Northern Europe simultaneously a few years ago where just everything was like, well, and died. So I like the idea that maybe in this book, all of the kids, you know, die at the same age as the elders that they've copied.

11:44Hannah:But they don't know, you see, this is the thing, because there's this terrible heartbreaking sequence at the end of the book when some of the characters that we've come to really know and love, when they start to have to give up their organs for donation. And you can normally do, I think, three or four donations and then you're dead. And they just passively, the thing that a lot of readers find fascinating but also quite troubling about it is that they don't rebel. They just passively go along with it. And I mean, that's effectively what we all do with our own mortality, isn't it? Unless we freeze ourselves, which you will know much more about than me, but I think it's probably bonkers.

12:16Hannah:It's probably bonkers.

12:18Dominic Sanbrook:The freezing isn't bonkers. It's the unfreezing that we haven't figured out yet. But the hope is that if we freeze you in 500 years, we'll be able to figure it out. Now, whether we'll honor the contract and say, yep, let's bring them back is another question because we could find ourselves with, you know, hundreds of thousands of frozen people. Right. And we figure out how to bring them back and we all go, yeah, but where are they going to live? We basically would have this migrant crisis.

12:47Hannah:Right, exactly. People are so grumpy about immigrants now. Imagine if people start saying, oh, there's people who are coming out from 500 years ago, taking all our jobs. That's insane. That would never happen.

12:58Dominic Sanbrook:Coming here in their frozen carriers. It won't be a bunch of migrants who are thawed and will take jobs. Because at the moment, all these frozen people, there's hundreds of them, they're super old. Because you cannot freeze someone unless they're dead.

13:13Hannah:Yes, that would make sense.

13:15Dominic Sanbrook:If you were to freeze me, you would be murdering me according to the law. And so people who sign up to these services, they usually stay in like a hospice or a nursing home near a freezing facility. And at the moment that they're pronounced dead, the companies can come in. They flush out the blood, replace it with an antifreeze solution. They got to cool the brain really fast. and they just they cover you with liquid nitrogen and they pump your heart with this machine to get to suck in the antifreeze and out the blood and then they put you in a big doer of liquid nitrogen and that's where you stay in a big warehouse um but they hang you upside down like a bat

13:54Hannah:did you know this no i didn't know that they're freezing you at a point when you wouldn't want to be frozen so you would want to be frozen surely at your peak exactly in your physical prime wouldn't you i mean if i was going to be frozen i wouldn't want to be frozen now i'd want to be frozen when I was 25.

14:07Dominic Sanbrook:Ooh, I wouldn't mind being frozen now, but I'm excited for what's coming next in my life. I think the problem is everyone who's being frozen right now is being frozen at literally the worst part, their death. Like when they come back, they're going to be like, oh, but I'm still dying. Like I'm still, I'm still 107 years old. So of course the real hope is that we'll be able to copy their brains and give them a computer bodies and robot bodies and reproduce their consciousness digitally.

14:39Hannah:But then that gets you back to that question, Michael, doesn't it? If you could upload your brain into the cloud and then download this again into another vehicle, would you still be you? Yeah, exactly.

14:51Dominic Sanbrook:Exactly. Whoever woke up would definitely think they were me because they would have the continuous life story that I've already built for them. Yeah. But yeah, it's weird to think when I close my eyes and die and then I'm rethought, am I going to be like, oh.