What?
Making exact genetic copies of yourself or others.
Where seen?
Whether it’s cloning Hitler in movie classic – and book – The Boys from Brazil (1978), or a convenient method of researching evolution as in television series Orphan Black or – also very cozy – to grow spare organs like in film The Island (2005): Human cloning is very common in science fiction stories.
How close are we?
The world’s most famous clone is believed to be Dolly the sheep, born in 1996 to not one, but three mothers. One delivered her egg, one her DNA (plucked from an udder) and one acted as a surrogate mother. Of those three, only the second is genetically linked to Dolly. Or, in fact, they are genetically the same. After all, as a clone, Dolly is a copy of her mother, although there are also real differences, just like with genetically identical twins.
To make Dolly, 277 eggs were fertilized at the time, from which 29 embryos arose. Only three of those embryos grew into lambs and only Dolly survived the birth. In 2003, a vet had Dolly put to sleep after suffering from pneumonia. Her stuffed remains are on display at the Scottish National Museum in Edinburgh. In 2016, biologists noted in the trade magazine Nature Communications that cloned sheep – more followed after Dolly – basically just grow old healthy.
Like Dolly, you can also clone people. As early as 2013, researchers beschrijven in, among other things, trade magazine cell how they made embryonic genetic copies of human patients. Embryos, by the way, in the medical sense of the word: clumps of cells in which you cannot see a person even with the greatest imagination.
The main difference with Dolly’s creation is that these embryos never reached maturity. They were cultured for their stem cells, unspecialized cells that can later transform into other types, such as heart or kidney cells. Such stem cells are useful in the treatment of conditions such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
If you want to make a fully grown clone, it’s easy on paper. In that case, just like with Dolly, you above all need a surrogate mother.
That’s where ethics come in. Just producing embryos for stem cells for research or medical treatment is a morally thorny issue. In the Netherlands it is even prohibited by law.
Not to mention whether you want to create identical genetic copies of humans at all. You can have your dead dog cloned by a commercial agency, but your mother or child? Almost everyone feels that you should not want that, that you are crossing an elusive ethical boundary.
Besides, before you know it, you are indeed opening the door to dystopian scenarios where people will clone Hitler, or decide that an island full of genetic copies is a good idea so that you can periodically clean them of organs when they begin to degrade from their originals. falter.
All this makes human cloning a rare phenomenon: a science fiction technology that has been possible for a long time, but which, on closer inspection, we would rather not try.