We will be able to do that in the future if most moderately-well-off people keep pre-emptive copies.
You would get one copy, but why not just use embryo selection instead to shift the population up? The point of cloning in breeding programs is typically to enable a single elite donor to make a huge and disproportionate contribution to the population, when you’ve already started using selection strategies like truncation selection to the top 10%. I hardly need to explain why no such things are at all viable for human populations.
The main benefit it has over current cloning tech is that it avoids the health issues for the clones, which currently make it unviable.
That didn’t seem like it was all that big a deal. Even Dollie’s siblings were fine.
Human cloning hasn’t been tried and found hard, it hasn’t been tried. It’s like CRISPR editing human babies; if your inference from the absence of CRISPR babies pre-He Jiankui was that “gosh, this must be very hard”, you were very wrong. The true problems with human cloning were never any objections about it being super-difficult or hard to figure out. We could get human cloning to work with very little collective research effort. (How much did those Chinese primates cost? A few million bucks?) Compared to many things researchers accomplish… This is one reason why the Raelians weren’t laughed out of the building when they announced they had cloned someone, because the experts knew deep down that a serious effort would definitely succeed. It’s just no one wants to look like a Raelian or eugenicist, and there is little demand compared to more ordinary ways of having kids. (Who wants a clone of themself? Gay couples? No, because then one is left out, they’d rather have gametogenesis so they can have a true genetic child of them both.) So, it doesn’t happen. And it’ll continue on not happening for who knows how long. Lots of things are like that.
You would get one copy, but why not just use embryo selection instead to shift the population up? The point of cloning in breeding programs is typically to enable a single elite donor to make a huge and disproportionate contribution to the population, when you’ve already started using selection strategies like truncation selection to the top 10%. I hardly need to explain why no such things are at all viable for human populations.
That didn’t seem like it was all that big a deal. Even Dollie’s siblings were fine.
Human cloning hasn’t been tried and found hard, it hasn’t been tried. It’s like CRISPR editing human babies; if your inference from the absence of CRISPR babies pre-He Jiankui was that “gosh, this must be very hard”, you were very wrong. The true problems with human cloning were never any objections about it being super-difficult or hard to figure out. We could get human cloning to work with very little collective research effort. (How much did those Chinese primates cost? A few million bucks?) Compared to many things researchers accomplish… This is one reason why the Raelians weren’t laughed out of the building when they announced they had cloned someone, because the experts knew deep down that a serious effort would definitely succeed. It’s just no one wants to look like a Raelian or eugenicist, and there is little demand compared to more ordinary ways of having kids. (Who wants a clone of themself? Gay couples? No, because then one is left out, they’d rather have gametogenesis so they can have a true genetic child of them both.) So, it doesn’t happen. And it’ll continue on not happening for who knows how long. Lots of things are like that.