I’m not a biologist or scientist, but I’m genuinely curious why we can’t create clones of people?
With the computational power we have these days, shouldn’t we be able to compute all options to understand how things work from the foundation up?
Is the research cost too high? Or is this already being done?
In: Biology
Imagine the weird world where celebrities were selling cells to make clones of themselves to prospective parents. Rather then five girls with the same trendy name from that year, your class would have five clones of Jennifer Aniston.
There’s nothing in science that says that we can’t. There are though laws, regulations, codes of ethics, etc against it in countries that most likely have the technology to be able to do it. That’s what is stopping it.
We totally could, we don’t for ethical reasons. Some people object to the idea of replicating a person’s genes, and most people object to the much higher risk of genetic issues and birth defects we’ve noticed in clones of other animals.
We don’t because there’s no particular *use* or call for it. Clones are just completely separate people with their own mind who have the same genetic markers/make up. It’s not someone with the same brain or a way to “elongate” one’s life like in movies.
We can. You just have to wait 50 years, and then everyone turns into an identical copy of their parents.
Been happening in my family for several generations now.
We can. However, because it’s so ethically questionable, no known attempt has yet been made. We do clone human cells for labwork, but in conditions where they just grow as undifferentiated clusters of cells, instead of with all the complexity of a foetus. For example, there’s something called the HeLa cell line. This has been absolutely vital for research for many decades now, and the line consists of countless clones of cells from a woman called Henrietta Lacks. They’re just immortalised cancer cells floating in baths of cow blood, but in a sense, clones of Lacks have outlived her by almost 70 years.
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