Human cloning: Could the super-rich be doing it in secret?

In my decades of reporting on incredible advances in biology, I've seen some ideas become fashionable, receive intense media coverage for a few years, and then fade back out of public view. Take human cloning.

After the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheephit the news headlines in 1997there was much speculation about whether humans would be cloned next, and there were even some almost certainly false claims that it had been done. But in recent years there has been almost no murmur.

However, reproductive technologies have advanced significantly since the 1990s. In particular, first gene-edited children were created – illegally – just six years after their development CRISPR. So sometimes I wonder what's going on behind the scenes. Could human clones already exist somewhere without warning? Apart from identical twins, of course.

Why would anyone want to do this? Remember how Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught talking at a recent meeting about life extension through organ transplantation? The best way to do this would be to create clones for organ harvesting, so that there would not be problems with immune rejection, as is often explored in science fiction, from the movie Island to the book Never let Me Go.

There is also the idea that cloning creates a copy of a person and thus can grant a kind of immortality, as shown in the series. Foundationwhere the empire is ruled by a series of clones. But we know from the experience of identical twins that having the same genome does not make you the same person. How actress Tatiana Maslany portrayed her so well in the series Orphan Blackeach clone will be a unique individual. However, rich people, like everyone else, can have irrational beliefs and often seem especially anxious to preserve and extend their lives.

Meanwhile, scientists have the honor of being the first to achieve something. A commission in China concluded that the creator of CRISPR children “conducted research illegally in pursuit of personal fame and gain”.

Purpose of therapeutic cloning

So, can human clones exist? For a long time it was believed that cloning mammals was impossible. Although the cells of early embryos can form any part of the body, they soon become specialized, a process that must have been irreversible.

Dolly proved the opposite. It was created by fusing an adult sheep's udder cell with an egg devoid of its DNA. Dolly became a world celebrity after its existence was announced in February 1997.

Her birth led to numerous attempts to create cloned human embryos. The goal was not to create cloned children, but to obtain embryonic stem cells for new types of medical therapy. Because cloned cells are a perfect match for a person, they could theoretically be used to create replacement tissues or organs that are ideal for that person, meaning they won't be rejected by the immune system.

But obtaining stem cells from cloned human embryos has proven more difficult than expected. It wasn't until 2004 that biologist Woo Seok-hwan claimed to have done it. At the time, I was very impressed with how well his article was written and addressed all possible objections. Nevertheless, the study was falsified and the paper was put away—a lesson I never forgot. These days, if an article seems too good to be true, I assume it isn't.

After all, it wasn't until 2013 that embryonic stem cells were truly derived from a cloned human embryo. By that time we had already developed other methods obtain the appropriate stem cellsturning on a few key genes, so interest in therapeutic cloning has waned.

Cloned pets and other animals

Meanwhile, however, animal cloning has become well established. Every now and then, there's a flurry of headlines when a celebrity says they've cloned a pet – most recently former NFL star Tom Brady, reportedly. revealed that his dog is a clonecreated by a company acquired Colossal biological sciences.

In addition to what is proposed as a way “bring back” your beloved petscloning is used in agriculture and horse breeding. For example, male horses are often castrated, so if one of them becomes, say, a champion show jumper, the only way to use his genome for further breeding is to create clones.

However, animal cloning remains extremely problematic. 2022 document on first 1000 dog clones created in one laboratory showed that the process is still very inefficient: only 2 percent of implanted cloned embryos result in a live birth. This is one of the reasons why pet cloning will cost you a lot. a cool $50,000.

Moreover, about a fifth of the cloned dogs had obvious physical differences, including a large tongue, different colored eyes, cleft palate and excessive muscle mass. Several male dog clones were physically female.

But if a rich or powerful person didn't care about all this, could they try to clone themselves?

Why is it so difficult to clone adults?

Many sources will tell you this. monkeys have been successfully cloned several times since 2017, suggesting it would work with humans as well. Most of these sources are silent about the fact that at the moment all these primate clones were created from embryonic cellsnot adults.

The problem is that reprogramming an adult cell back to an embryonic state is much more difficult than reprogramming an embryonic cell. But to me, cloning means creating a genetically identical copy of an adult human—that's what made Dolly so great.

The point is, I'm pretty sure it's not yet possible to clone an adult human—and in a world with no shortage of dictators and outlandish billionaires, that's a very good thing.

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