February 22, 2001

11:37 AM

(You)^2: Wired Feature on Human Cloning
There's a very long, very fascinating article on the current work being done on human cloning research; or possibly the work that has already been done. Many of those interviewed for the article are convinced that somewhere in the world human cloning has already taken place. Lots of cool/frightening material here.
posted by hanseugene (2 comments total)

What's really weird is that the people referred to in the story have the desire to clone lost loved ones, but they evidently don't know that you're not at all likely to end up with the same person. Environmental factors play too much of a role in development. For example, identical twins who are raised separately... they aren't even close to being the same person, despite having identical genetic codes.

Not to mention that it even if it did work that way, it would be foolhardy to clone, say, your dead wife. You'd have to wait 20-30 years for her to be born, grow up, and so on, and by then you'd be very old or dead. We can't just pop out full grown human beings from a test tube or something. Or, cloning yourself... you're not going to just pick up where you left off. You'll be an entirely different person, with no awareness of who you were(you won't be you at all, you'll just be another baby, who happens to have the same genetic code as some dead guy). None of this will stop people from wanting to do it, but it's just plain dumb to do it for those kinds of reasons.
posted by jdunn_entropy at 12:51 PM on February 22, 2001

What's with the writing in Wired? When will this dopey apocalyptic/Dean-Koontz-thriller style suddenly be recognized as ridiculous by their editors?
posted by Joe Hutch at 2:18 PM on February 22, 2001