Cloning seems like it has the potential to cure disabilities and diseases, and also make farming easier. With so many potential uses why is it that nothing major has happened since Dolly the sheep?
In: 1789
Lots of great points here around clone crops and the general goal of organ cloning but I want to add the risk of cloning on a larger scale, especially with more complex organisms.
It’s already a bit of a dnger with plants but imagine if cloning beef cows became cheaper than breeding. This is unlikely but we’ll roll with it.
You’ve cloned a whole herd from a single cow, you’ve now got a full herd from nothing without having to slowly build it up, which is great! Except that one cow was a little susceptible to a new cow flu variant just by chance. Where once that might have meant losing a few from the herd, now you could conceivably lose the entire lot.
Monocultures have already become an issue in large scale forestation efforts, where planting huge forests of only one tree means if a disease that affects that species shows up, you lose massive areas of forest (happening in northern China).
So it’s not that useful as a technology. Instead, being able to clone your own liver for a transplant means there should be no rejection. The difficulty is in cloning just the organ and not the whole person (ethically messy, and youd need them to grow for years before… Well it’s not a good idea) since that’s hard and we still can’t grow organs in labs
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