On an NPR segment about the media, I heard a story about the recent marketing campaign for the new movie, Godsend, which kind of sounds like an updated, hi-tech Rosemary's Baby.

If you go to Google and input "cloning", at the top, as a sponsored link, you'll see:

Cloning Is Now A Reality
www.godsendinstitute.org/
The Godsend Institute Can Create Life From Life Via Cloning, Today!

The link takes you to the website for the Godsend Institute, which tells you that if you've lost a child, they can clone it for you. It's complete with testimonials and photographs of reunited families.

The NPR story wondered aloud if this was crossing an ethical line. The site is professionally-done and doesn't really have obvious indications it's a fake website for a movie. There are a couple of questions to be answered here, the first is, would this fool anybody? I think probably not. Knowledge of the current state of cloning technology is readily available to anyone already on the internet. When they get to the point of actually calling the contact information, they get a telephone ad for the movie.

More likely is that someone who has lost a child might be offended by the use of this particular situation to fictionally market a movie. I don't know.

This isn't a brand new form of marketing. The upcoming I, Robot movie has a site where you can order an NS-5 personal robot that obeys the 3 Laws of Robotics. I don't think anybody's going to expect a robot to be shipped to their doorstep.

But it does seem quite a bit more potentially offensive to put up a professional fake site promising parents that their dead children can be reborn.