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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   714 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 26, 2026

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Just like how there was a massive moral panic about human cloning, and then the second it became possible there was sudden total radio silence. :^) I’m sure they aren’t doing anything in secret though.

There's not really that much use for human cloning. The result is a baby with specific genes, but there are still all the stochastic differences from growing from embryo to baby to adult.

It's possible that China has a secret lab full of Terance Tao clones to work on future government project but it's not clear if there would be any ROI from that.

Now, rich parents secretly / quietly using CRISPR to try to give advantages to their future children? Definitely happening.

rich parents secretly / quietly using CRISPR to try to give advantages to their future children? Definitely happening.

Is this an intuition or something you’ve seen? Would be very interesting if it were the latter but my impression is that the wealthy tend to be risk-averse.

Well, the lunatic fringe seem to be interested. Nutjob more money than sense Bryan Johnson is claiming he has a clone of himself for, basically, spare parts. I very much doubt this, though I am sure there are unscrupulous medical researchers perfectly happy to promise any Mr. Moneybags they'll get him whatever he wants, here's my bank account number, thank you.

Apparently it turns out that Mr. "I want to live forever" has a genuine medical problem of some nature, so of course he immediately leaps to "clone myself and use the resulting product as a guinea pig for treatments-cum-spare parts repository".

I am very nearly sorry for him, except that this is too damn much like all the classical Greek plays about hubris, plus at least he doesn't seem to actually be cloning a foetus, he's just having adult stem cells created:

The immortality influencer shared in an X update that he has a “baby” version of himself growing in a petri dish that he says will allow him to become his “own blood boy” — doesn’t he already have a son who does that for him? — and potentially even “grow organs for transplantation.”

“This may be scary to some people… a dystopian future,” Johnson wrote. “But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.”

In case this is all starting to sound like the grim sci-fi plot of a certain Michael Bay movie or Kazuo Ishiguro novel, it’s not a literal, living breathing clone. (Although by posting an infamous picture of himself edited to look like a baby, Johnson’s certainly playing into that impression.)

Instead, Johnson’s created his own pluripotent stem cells. These stem cells can self-renew and develop into any type of cell in the body, making them invaluable for repairing damaged tissue.

Where Johnson’s claims of cloning himself as a “newborn” come in is the fact that these highly versatile stem cells normally only exist when we’re still an embryo. But in recent decades scientists have developed techniques to reprogram regular adult cells into an embryonic pluripotent state, which are called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Johnson is confident that by having his own store of stem cells on hand he can “rebuild” his body, repairing everything from damaged lungs to eyesight.

“This technology gives us a path to reverse aging,” he declares.

If Johnson really was trying to grow a clone baby to full term, I think there's legal precedent with saviour babies where courts have permitted parents to implant embryos in order to obtain transplants for an already existing sick child. I don't like that, since the second child is explicitly only brought into being for spare parts (the parents didn't plan on having more children until their only child got sick) but it's legal. So Johnson probably could successfully argue he needs this saviour baby:

A savior baby, savior sibling, or donor baby is a child who is conceived in order to provide a stem cell, bone marrow, or other transplant to a sibling that is affected with a fatal disease, such as cancer or Fanconi anemia, that can best be treated by hematopoietic stem cell, or other transplant

If Johnson could get such a baby, would he be allowed to treat it as a guinea pig etc. or would he be obligated legally to only get the stem cell transplants and then raise the child as offspring (and not "Daddy needs a kidney, Daddy needs a lobe of your liver, Daddy needs your heart")?

And this, children, is why the Catholic Church is no-no on such tech because we hate progress and science and want everyone to suffer.

A quick wiki skim suggests 2008 as the first likely success in making cloned human embryos. Interest in human cloning has been pretty consistently declining for as long as there's data (since 2005) up until late 2025 and we are now at a ten year high.

The majority of people think cloning failed. Specifically, that Dolly died early from early-onset arthritis because the cloned DNA was 'old'. It's not true but it's very widely believed.

Source? I see a 2026 poll saying that people think cloning is immoral (64 percent for animals and 86 percent for humans), and a 2002 poll saying that people think cloning humans is possible (76 percent), but no poll saying that people think cloning is impossible or impractical due to accelerated aging.

None, sorry. Just an impression. I thought that until 25 or so, and I assumed that if I (knowing quite a lot about that sort of thing) took that long to get corrected, most people must still believe it.

For what it's worth, I was also under the impression that Dolly was a failure story.

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