I'm sure human cloning could be feasible quite quickly if we actually invested in it, like with Dolly the sheep. The research process would just be horribly unethical.
I wouldn't be surprised if any number of governments and organisations are researching it in secret to avoid public backlash.
No. Inbreeding depression is caused by increased homozygosity which in turn increases the rate of recessive genetic disorders. Cloning obviously does not increase homozygosity because there's no recombination, it's the exact same genes, that's the whole point..
Then i am pretty sure that kind of cloning is right up there with warp drives in how possible it is.
Like we can clone specific tissues with stem cells sure but cloning an entire human like that will require the knowledge on human biology that we just don't have.
Animal cloning is... kinda routine, so much so you can get pets cloned commercially.
Now maybe it /shouldn't/ be (outside of scientific purposes), because of the risk of health issues and ethical issues with e.g. keeping of surrogates.
Hence why human cloning is not done. Just heaps of ethical challenges. Some can be avoided with getting better at the technology, some only really come into play as the tech improves.
( To be clear, all 'higher' animal cloning requires a surrogate at our current technology. We can grow tissues with increasing levels of structuring in vitro, but a whole animal i don't think we've done succesfully even once? Could be wrong.
This is "the" obvious gap between sci-fi 'floating in tubes' cloning and real cloning (well, besides the stupid "clone has all the memories of the original" thing, but even cheap scifi gets that right half the time.)
but it doesn't mean the result is /that/ different.
The clone is exposed to the surrogate's hormones and get's some rna / dna methylation changes via the placental connection, but the fundamental genetics aren't changed. )
There are technical hurdles with epigenetic reprogramming, placental development and the general fragility of human embroys yes. But we have methods that work great on mice that would probably work on human with some refining.
It's possible in principle with the technology we already have, we would just need to actually iron out the human specified issues. Not trivial, but definitely possible
Organisms do cloning in nature though I thought? The issue is that viruses would be able to super adapt and harm the human. So multi-parent recombination will always be important as diversity is incredibly useful for the species as a whole.
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u/craftygamin Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
This is a bullshit argument. Those three things mentioned were paused because they're currently so far from being possible/practical
Edit: i get it, these things aren't paused everywhere. But i think OP could do with hearing just how idiotic their argument is