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Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, long ago expressed a desire to clone himself. To some extent I can understand the desire. There are many ways that my toddler son resembles me in terms of his behavior patterns that are uncanny. This allows me to gain insight into his thought process, and hopefully mentor him in a manner which would be more difficult if he wasn’t quite like me. The similarities we be even greater if he was a genetic clone. Personally, I am not inclined to clone myself because I get along very well with different types of people, and don’t have the impulse to encounter a literal mini-me. I’ve never, for example, regretted not having an identical twin. But to each his own.
I thought of Caplan when I read this article in New York Magazine, Paying $100,000 to Clone Your Dog Won’t Give You Your Dog Back:
Even still, sometimes the things you know with your head can’t compete with the comparatively dumb hopes of your heart. That NPR report referenced earlier included the story of Dr. Phillip Dupont and his wife, Paula, who run a veterinary clinic in Louisiana. The Duponts paid Sooam $100,000 to clone their dog Melvin, a pet they loved and trusted so deeply they even let the dog “babysit their grandson in the backyard all by himself.” The Duponts got three puppies out of the deal, though one of those puppies died. The other two are named Ken and Henry, and the couple is so happy with them they’re considering using Melvin’s DNA again — what better dog to give their grandson than one created with the DNA of his former babysitter?
It seems likely that over time the price point for cloning technologies will decline. It may be feasible for families to recreate, at least genetically, the same pet for generations using the original cell line. In Frank Herbert’s Dune series Duncan Idaho was resurrected over and over through an advanced form of cloning. And, if the need for continuity of identity is heritable, one can imagine clone lines of humans developing over time. This isn’t that far-fetched, there are many taxa where there are closely related clonal and sexual lineages. Similarly, one can imagine sexual random mating humans, and clonal lines who have sex only for pleasure.
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How soon before we have Axlotl Tanks to grow those screened & selected or even spell checked embryos in? Not to suggest we become the Tleilaxu and get rid of females. I rather like having them.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/cleveland-hospital-discuss-1st-uterus-transplant-us-37453770
Reproducing the old-fashioned way is a lot more fun, I imagine. Plus, recombination is cool.
But I would seriously consider cloning my dog if the price were more reasonable. 10K range would be tempting.
From age 1 to 15, I owned five parakeets in a row, all named Tweeter, all as identical to the last one as I could find at the pet store. “Death shall have no dominion!” was my motto as a child. If cloning had been around, I would have nagged by parents to use it to clone my Tweeter.
Interestingly, the five had rather different personalities.
Wasn’t the fly in the cloning ointment that if you took a cell nucleus or chromosone set from a middle aged donor, the clone would be more or less born middle aged? Did they figure out to back that out?
y u might want to get cells from when the person was young. shouldn’t be too hard if hospitals keep some samples…
Wait! Why would you have 5 parakeets in a row? We bought a common parakeet when my son was 2 and it is still alive after 16 years. Budgies can live for 8 years. 5 parakeets can last a lifetime. Now I can’t get rid of a child letting parakeets fly into a fan in rural Oregon.
Maybe he needs to confess to how many PBRs he has gone through.
Pet cat?
I’m not too friendly; the clone might not like me. What if one’s clone suicides.
Wait! Why would you have 5 parakeets in a row?
Maybe he needs to confess to how many PBRs he has gone through.
First Star Trek writers and then Stargate SG-1 writers assumed that multigenerational cloning would result in the buildup of copying errors and the eventual unviability of the line, or of the whole civilization if exclusively clones.
I assumed that was originally based on some popularizing articles of top-level ’80s science.
Is that SF trope still viable with what is currently known?
Scariest title I’ve ever read.
I used to toy with the idea of wanting an identical twin, but having children has disabused me of the notion. Being similar doesn’t mean you necessarily get along well (the kids are stubborn).
On second thought, most of the twins I know hate each other.
Slightly off-topic but the House of Suns is an incredibly good sci-fi about a cloning line (the story is about the Gentian line, who are all clones of an erst-while Abigail Gentian).
I would very strongly recommend it as it gives such a good flavour of how clones would interact with each other and their “familial” relationships..