CHAPTER 1

Orphan Black and Bioethics

Bioethics is one of today’s most exciting new fields. Orphan Black is one of the most exciting shows on television. Bioethics explores ethical issues in medicine and science. Orphan Black dramatizes ethical issues in medicine and science. What could be more appropriate than a marriage of the two? Like the two interwoven strands of nucleotides that make up DNA molecules, the famous “double helix,” they are intimately linked.

Bioethics erupted into the consciousness of North Americans in 1962 with a LIFE magazine article about the God Committee, which controversially decided on the basis of social worth who lived, and who died, in getting access to then-scarce kidney dialysis machines. As science and technology became more advanced, so did the ethical issues surrounding them: the questionable status as living persons of comatose patients with brain-stem reflexes such as Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, and Terri Schiavo; legal decisions about abortions; debates about heart transplants, surrogate mothers, AIDS, the vulnerability of psychiatric patients, greedy Big Pharma, Dr. Kevorkian, “Octomom,” research on animals, and Obamacare; treatment of intersex, gay, and transgender persons; and enhancements of people by drugs, surgery, and (of special relevance to Orphan Black) genetic interventions.

Then, of course, there looms the mega-bioethical issue of our times: cloning humans. From the moment in 1997 that banner headlines screamed about the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the world has been fascinated with the possibly horrific implications of human clones. Perhaps no other ethical issue in modern history has grabbed more attention, caused more hysteria, or inspired so much imaginative film and literature.

Orphan Black quintessentially dramatizes human cloning. By placing a clone, Sarah Manning, at the center of the story, and surrounding her with clone sisters and brothers from Projects Leda and Castor as well as the political and religious groups vying to control them, there is just no way the show could avoid engaging with cloning’s profound moral questions. Through the Emmy-worthy acting of Tatiana Maslany and a science-driven plot, Orphan Black raises issues about living at the edge of what it means to be a human, investigates the impact of nature and nurture on personality and character, and asks profound social and ethical questions about personal identity: How do our birth origins (whether we are created sexually, via assisted reproduction, or cloning) affect who we are? How does being gestated by a surrogate affect us later? What is it like to have not just one identical twin, but eight or fourteen identical twins? What if you and those twins are raised apart, with different parents and in different cultures? What happens if you are all raised together, like the Castors?

I have spent forty years in bioethics, thirty-four teaching in a medical school. Rare is the time in a professor’s life when a television show comes along that highlights the big issue of his or her career. Even rarer is when that same issue is one that has grabbed the world’s fascination and horror.

Before Orphan Black appeared, I wrote several books about human cloning and gave a hundred talks about it around the world. But cloning humans always seemed so abstract to people; the issue lacked human context. Conversations spring from fears and fantasies, not science and realism. People fear that the emergence of clones would mean inevitable descent into a dystopic, Blade Runner-style future. So Orphan Black, and the opportunity it provides as a major television drama to discuss human cloning, seemed too good to be true. Suddenly, I had a likeable character—multiple likeable characters!—who had been created by cloning. Not a “clone” or a soulless, Night of the Living Dead-style zombie, but a living, breathing, feeling, and yes, sexy, human being. Sarah Manning and her “sestras” (as Ukrainian-raised Helena refers to her clone “sisters”) provide that human context, a way to get viewers to see that maybe people could be created through cloning and the sky wouldn’t fall.

Actually, using Orphan Black to write about ethical issues is a nice compromise between discussing cloning abstractly and trying to imagine real clones in our midst. The difficulties that the sestras face are not exactly real because Orphan Black is, in the end, a fictional show. On the other hand, its scenes and action don’t feel like desert island cases that could never occur. They feel real and urgent.

Nor does this usefulness go only one way. Looking at Orphan Black through the lens of bioethics can also enrich our understanding of the show’s characters and story line, and what is at stake for and in them.

Regardless of what season four holds for the show (and I hope many seasons beyond that), the existing three seasons contain more than enough material to discuss not only all the ethical issues of human cloning, but many other issues in modern bioethics as well, from genetic engineering to medical experimentation to the commercialization of life itself—all of which we’ll talk about in this book.