Comment by nuguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nuguy | Hacker News Reader

I watched a 60 minutes segment about horse cloning. An oil heir from Texas became very interested in polo, a sport where horses are rode and where the genetics of the horses are what decide the winner more or less. So instead of starting his own breeding program, this guy started a horse cloning operation in Argentina — its absolutely fascinating. When asked how different horse cloning would be from human cloning, he shook his head slowly and said that horse cloning is probably extremely similar to human cloning and that human cloning could be done very, very easily. When asked if he would ever consider cloning humans he gave an emphatic “no” and said that he had been asked by “some of the wealthiest people in the world” to clone humans in some capacity, and that he refused every time. Gives me shivers :P

It is interesting that there are both the means and the demand for human cloning. It stands to reason to assume that it has been done.

Cloning is a remarkably simple process from what I have read. Basically all you do is extract an egg from a female doner, take out its dna, insert a skin cell from the animal you want to clone, pull current through the egg to activate it and then place the egg Into a surrogate mother. The extraction and insertion of dna is literally done with a very small needle — no nano-tech or black magic. Just a needle. It really is remarkable.

> Cloning is a remarkably simple process from what I have read

Fewer than 10% of cloned animals survive to birth as of below 2016 report. Given human gestation period are much longer as well as far more limited cycles available per female, you are going to have very hard time cloning humans.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/cow-gene-study-shows-why-most-c...

I’ve actually already read that link. I was disappointed in its lack of detail. I’ll have to read the paper sometime.

Your point about the gestation length is really good. Do you have a background in biology or cloning?

Also I just read that horses actually have a slightly longer gestation period than humans

My understanding is that though there is reason to think it wouldn't be any more difficult in principle than cloning horses there would inevitably be a great deal of failure on the way to perfecting the techniques. For example cloning Dolly required 434 failed attempts. Three of those made it to term but died very soon after birth. Those are pretty poor odds to put a child through.

I think while you describe the basic technique in practice it's more difficult to do and especially to apply to a new species than you describe. Here's a paper on the first cloning of a monkey https://www.academia.edu/36564149/. Just scroll down to see the full paper. It's not all that short or simple

Dolly was born 22 years ago and was the first mammal cloned with this process. While there might be some failures for an organization attempting to clone a human I suspect an organization with prior cloning experience could reduce the failure rate by an order of magnitude.

Cloning isn't really an unnatural process per se, apples and bananas are grown through cloning. The majority of people see it as unethical or whatnot but if you're being born from a mother, grown up like a normal child, are you really unnatural?

Although it is true that there is a large failure rate and it is in essence a pretty expensive operation for something people can already do, which is reproduce.

https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cloning/cloningmyths...

Maybe I'm just in cynical dystopian mode, but when I hear of the extreme wealthy wanting clones, I think "guaranteed compatible living organ bank for me to harvest as needed"

It’s inspiring to think that somewhere there may already be living human clones created by someone paid a lot of money by a wealthy individual who won’t take no for an answer.

Inspiring? In what way?

I fail to see how one could view the exercise of power to achieve an end that many consider both illegal and immoral as inspiring. Am I missing the point here?

Inspiring if you're very very rich and hope to some day within your life time to get some spare/replacement organs.

Inspiring in the way that there are still people willing to do what is unpopular in an effort to advance scientific understanding.

You’re conflating popularity and ethics. Unpopular research can still be ethical. This research is unethical.

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