Human reproductive cloning: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time | Hacker News Reader

Human reproductive cloning: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

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72 pointsbookofjoe131 comments

I’m convinced that a human has definitely been cloned. I’m convinced a lot of things have happened that are taboo or socially not-yet-accepted.

Somewhere in the world there is a lab (or many) doing this kind of thing. The technology exists. We have more people on the planet than ever before. Someone has surely thought, “yeah it’s illegal/immoral/unethical/uncharted territory but someone has gotta try this and it’s gonna be me”

I could be wrong of course, it’s just a theory. But I think that statistically it makes more sense to assume it’s already happened than to assume otherwise.

I agree that someone might have tried that, but the real question is, was the clone viable? From what I remember from my human genetics class in uni, cloning is not just about the genes but also about Methylation sites that are carried by complex machinery in the womb (a subject of Epigenetics).

Are there reasons to believe that human clones are different in this regard from animal clones? Animal clones are viable and live as long as its parent.

Animal clones can live as long as the parent, but there are many issues with birth defects and elevated mortality. The early clones were the results of many hundreds of attempts, and for completely unknown reasons, primates have proven much more difficult than sheep and cows.

Even ignoring the ethical concern around cloning itself, putting a potential mother through this and producing a child at high risk of serious developmental problems seems extremely problematic ethically.

There are, the machinery I mentioned is a lot more complex in humans. The expression of genes is heavily influenced by how the DNA folds (and this is affected by complexes of proteins that Methylate at different locations in the DNA)

It's almost impossible for a single mad scientist to do it all on their own. Cloning requires tremendous amount of money and equipments.

Considering how socially unaccepted human cloning currently it, it'll most likely have to be a highly secretive government project

Which is exactly why I wonder who would do it. For private industry, there has to be profit motive, otherwise why bother?

So if reputable research institutions won't clone humans due to ethical concerns and private biotech can't make money from it, that leaves only governments. So what would motivate a government to clone humans? Especially since making more people isn't particularly difficult the regular way.

A dictator with a huge ego could be motivated to try. Particularly one that was already a pariah by international standards.

I fully expected Saddam Hussein to create the first human clone.

To have spare parts for himself?

Well, truly private biotech might. Some billionaire who wants to do it 'for science' might have the motive and ability.

What you say sounds completely conspiracy theorist, but I also think you are probably right. I don't know if we have the technology to clone a human. I don't understand enough about genetics and biotechnology to know where we stand. What I do know is that governments and well funded organizations have a vested interest in knowing what the general public does not. Advancements either good or bad were never made by playing it safe and following the rules. Being that things like this are illegal is exactly the reason why they keep it a secret as to how many advancements we make in certain areas.

> Advancements either good or bad were never made by playing it safe and following the rules

What important advancement in science or technology do you know that was illegal at the time? I can't think of even one of the top of my head.

There were lots of secret technologies, like Turing's research, but it would not have been illegal if it had been carried out in the open, it was just a state secret.

But it requires way more collaboration and effort than just one guy in a lab, right? How would a group keep a secret that powerful?

Kennedy told only 6 people that he accepted Khrushchev's deal to remove missiles from Cuba and Turkey which was one of the most powerful secrets in the world to disarm WW3, possibly one of the many decisions that saved the human race from nuclear annihilation. His vice president didn't even know. And the thought that Kennedy just stared down Khrushchev until Khrushchev gave in remained a core part of US international negotiation ever since. The deal was only declassified 20 years ago.

So I don't really buy this common internet "if it happened, we'd know about it" meme that secrets are so hard to keep.

Facts are easy to keep as secret. Organization is hard to keep as a secret since it involves an entire supply chain. If the secret you mentioned really required 6 people knowing it, then it can be easy to keep. Hypothetically, cloning a human requires a lot of materials that needs to be provided, so it may be harder to keep as a secret.

But what if only a portion of the information is a secret? Couldn't you run a lab and be pretty open that you're doing research cloning animals and just conveniently leave out that the animals are human? That's not meant to trivialize your point at all, but it also seems like the entire supply chain doesn't actually need to know what's going on.

> So I don't really buy this common internet "if it happened, we'd know about it" meme that secrets are so hard to keep.

Another data point: The Manhattan Project. It was large, involved a ton of people, and still managed to keep a lot of secrecy around itself for some time.

Likewise, the Guatemala syphilis experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments

The Manhattan Project started in 1942, was penetrated by Soviet spies no later than 1943 (Klaus Fuchs), and was known to the whole world by 1945. It's not a great example of extended secret-keeping.

A small group of 10 or so scientists, well funded by a nation state could absolutely do it, and absolutely keep it secret

I have friends who are working on killer robots (terminator style) and they are not interested in fame or notoriety, they want the technical challenge and the fat paycheque. Whether you agree with the ethics of this is irrelevant, the point is, it can be done

Take a second and re-read your comment. Do you really think it would be hard?

There are institutions scattered all over the globe that do shit behind closed doors. Jeffrey Epstein (et all), Scientology, Russia, North Korea, the Nazis, Hydra (kidding) and a ton of engineering, defense, biotech labs all over the place.

It’s not hard to do something secretly if you have money.

Small teams can move mountains. I mean look at the Manhattan Project or Lockheed Martin during the golden years of stealth technology.

USA probably has a lead cause they have biolaboratories developing bio weapons in several former USSR republics (Georgia, Uzbekistan, maybe others). Most probably viruses that target Slavic population are developed in those labs. Also there are rumors that in Georgia they use prisoners to test biological weapons on humans.

Aside from incentives being strongly aligned, financial or otherwise, there are certainly bleak and dark scenarios I can imagine to rigidly keep any behaviour hidden from the majority of society.

I hate to have an annoying over-simplified answer but... Epstein.

https://www.france24.com/en/20191230-china-chinese-scientist...

Makes me curious, along history, where there occurences of people / labs working on stuff they shouldn't ? (beside war contexts)

Outside of governments making their own WMDs against international rules, the closest would have to be Aum Shinrikyo. Before their sarin attack in Tokyo, they also manufactured VX gas, recruited scientists from different fields, and conducted experiments in the Australian Outback. There is a more farfetched conspiracy that they used the remoteness to test a nuclear bomb ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjawarn_Station ).

Yes of course, lots of them.

The most recent is probably the CRISPR babies from the Chinese team. But just in the US there is an entire Wikipedia page of unethical experiments (that we know of). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

by history I meant before this era (say post-ww2 .. today)

Is it unethical? I think that before long, we won't think that cloning humans is unethical. The reason is that the moral stances start sliding when the idea becomes more and more well known and normalized, in for example fiction.

>I’m convinced that a human has definitely been cloned.

Me too. The article is full of stories of physicists; scientists and well funded companies who set off to clone a human...one company even left the grasp of US regulatory bodies and went to the Bahamas and claims they have successfully cloned more than a dozen humans but won't reveal the clones or parent(s) due to privacy.

And the scientists' stories are all to similar, with initial claims of successes then subsequent admissions of fraud for there not to be more there there. These are legit physicists and scientists from around the World, presumably they know their claims of successful human cloning could readily be confirmed through testing, yet they try to defraud the World? There just doesn't seem to be anything to be gained by defrauding the World knowing your claim will readily be proven/disproved...I think there were likely many successes then the money from private interests and heavy hands of the regulators saw to it the truth was quashed.

the idea of potentially walking among clones made me sick

ps: its not a moral judgement, just gut feeling (this is the first time I considered it a reality)

>the idea of potentially walking among clones made me sick

Well for sure you are walking among "test tube babies" (IVF) where an egg is fertilized by donor sperm and transferred into a uterus, (sometimes the biological mother and sometimes a non-biological "host").

I don't really see the difference from starting with donor sperm and donor egg and starting with donor cell and donor egg.

Admittedly I have read all kinds of case law in this area (not clones but parental rights with respect to biological mothers/children and host mothers), so perhaps I am a little desensitized to the uniqueness and reality of birthing options made available today.

Fair point, but IVF are a single new person, not an existing one you'd copy.

You're also walking among many, many real-life clones. They occur naturally at a rate of about 1 in 400 births.

This is what I was looking for. I mean... Twins right. Sources are great though. Sauce?

My mother is an OB/GYN, that's where I get the 1 in 400 rate from. Quick googling will tell you that the identical twin rate is 3 per thousand ( https://www.verywellfamily.com/identical-twins-2447126 ) or 4 per thousand ( https://twinsmagazine.com/incidence-of-twins-by-twin-type/ ), or half the rate of fraternal twins (the first link again, but this is false -- the rate of fraternal twinning depends on the parents' race, but the rate of identical twinning doesn't).

Why would you consider a clone to be a copy of a person? They share genetics, but not background, childhood memories, development, etc.

Are you also scared of twins?

That's an interesting gut reaction. Meditating why would be an interesting exercise.

Almost all animals, us included, reject unknown things at first, likely because they might pose unknown dangers. Fortunately, humans are equipped to deal with that by understanding the real dangers, and decide if rejection is still necessary afterwards.

Or I could very well understand the thing deep enough and feel "no thanks".

To be fair, full human cloning is a thing that has no practical purpose IMO. Rich people can't beat death with clones because they don't inherit their memories, they would have to be raised like normal babies, and not-rich people can still make them the fun old cheap way.

The only practical purpose I can see of human cloning would be transplants, so we'd better learn to grow organs instead of people.

They do have purposes, however dubious and grim. Off the top of my head I can think of parents replacing dead children.

I don't understand why? They're just twin siblings of the DNA donor...

The weirdest form of racism is being prejudiced against groups that don't exist yet.

putting the "pre" in prejudice.

How would this be racism?

I guess it is more aptly called bigotry. I was thinking along the lines of cloneship being a physical property of someone that's inherent to how they're produced (like how a newborn is probably going to be Black if its parents are Black) but the more I think about that the more it doesn't really apply because clones can really be any race.

People use 'racism' to mean 'bigotry' in general these days. Whether you accept this or not depends on your stance on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism.

PS: There's a wonderful This American Life story about a pair of ranchers who cloned their prize bull, Chance. Second Chance, the clone, wasn't quite what they expected.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/291/reunited-and-it-feels-s...

But why? A clone would be their very own person who just happens to have an identical genome to another person.

I see a potential issue if you were cloned while in uterus, making the other person potentially a twin with months difference in age, but not an actual twin because you did not share the same uterus or biological mother. So in the future, in the case you run into that person, there might be a chance of some temporary confusion/distress between you.

We've seen some movies in which ETs all look the same to us. They are like clones to our eyes. So maybe this is something that already inhabits our deeper imagination, and wouldn't be that bad if someday it happens to our kind. Who knows...

I bet identical twins REALLY turn your stomach too.

How do you know you aren't a clone?

Why?

- the fear of human control over things I consider 'out of line'

- the potential emotions behind the existence of the clone (lost sibling, child) .. heavy

How is the emotional aspect any different than an identical twin besides the age not exactly matching?

why do people keep bringing up twins..

Because they are naturally occurring clones? Sure, scientists have found some genetic variation, but they are incredibly close.

Creating clones would be interesting because we'd get to know more about the difference between a clone and a twin.

Having a clone does not give you an identical copy of an adult person. All you get is an identical twin that is years younger and likely has additional medical problems. Why would you invest a lot of time and effort into that?

Btw: The article does discuss why you still might want to do it. It's worth a read, but it turned out none of the reasons was good enough.

I mean, could be interesting in resolving some nature vs nurture questions.

Pick a famous scientist (Einstein? Hawkings?) clone them, and watch.

Does this person rise to the top of their field? Are they even interested in physics? How much of intelligence ends up being your genes vs your environment?

Probably not a good enough reason to clone though :)

Would Stephen Hawking get ALS again? It seems the disease made him really concentrate his efforts on his studies and research more, it’s a strange thought experiment. Is it ethical to condemn another person to a life locked in ALS to get the greatness that was Stephen Hawking’s contributions to science? Surely not. I wonder what Stephen would say.

Identical twin studies show that ALS seems to definitely have an environmental trigger affecting methylation of genes. My best guess is you get a Stephen Hawking twin that gets to enjoy a life of boating and walking and doesn’t contribute as much to science.

Clone Beethoven and you get a talented kid that makes some SoundCloud songs and may have a small OxyContin problem. I think environment and random chance is far more important than we realize.

You can do that with twin studies.

A little bit. There's just a much smaller sample size to draw from. The ideal candidates for these sort of studies would be monozygotic twins (3 in 1000 births) who are adopted by different parents.

You can draw a few conclusions from that, but it's a pretty small sample pool.

The other somewhat unique thing you'd get here is how much prenatal nutrition matters.

One type of study I heard about is comparing a large group of pairs of identical twins to a large group of fraternal twins (with each pair being raised together in the same household). The idea is that all the pairs from both groups experienced the same nurture (same parents, location, schooling, etc. at the same time), but one group has nearly identical genes with their twins, while the other merely has varying degrees of similar. If some measured effect is more commonly shared by the identical twins than the fraternal, it's likely due to the genetics rather than environmental factors.

I never took any biology-related courses beyond high school, so I don't have any sort of knowledge to tell if this would actually work in practice, but the idea seems interesting to me.

If you are really interested in this you need to watch the documentary Three Identical Strangers. It's amazing.

I mean, we have this. Identical twins are essentially natural clones.

To have a source for replacement organs?

You are not even allowed to take the organs of a recently dead body if the person did not agree to that before death. Why would you be allowed to do it to a live person?!

Ask Falun Gong followers

> An independent tribunal sitting in London has concluded that the killing of detainees in China for organ transplants is continuing, and victims include imprisoned followers of the Falun Gong movement.

> The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who was a prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said in a unanimous determination at the end of its hearings it was “certain that Falun Gong as a source - probably the principal source - of organs for forced organ harvesting”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

"Why would you be allowed to do it to a live person?"

Because you are the government making the rules, or you have a few billion dollars and can easily hide it.

I'm not sure anyone's doing it, but if it is truly the case that nobody has cloned a human, it isn't because of "the rules". "The rules" don't apply to everywhere or to everybody.

I mean, there are countries that don't care about human rights and possess the necessary technology.

However, growing whole human for just an organ or two is a huge waste of resources.

The book The House of the Scorpion has, as part of its premise, some ultra-rich drug lords who raise clones for organ replacements. (Seems like the right combination of rich and unscrupulous.) Most of those clones are injected with something to disable their brains at birth, with at least one exception.

Man you don't get out much. There are really bad people out there, and really bad places: it's big business in certain parts of the world.

Even if you discount how morally wrong this is, cloning does not imply accelerated growth. Even if you started now, your (likely) involunatary donor will not be ready for many years, likely long enough for your morally corupt self to be long dead due to organ failure by then.

The question was ‘Why would you invest a lot of time and effort into that?’ If you’re Kim Jong-un, why wouldn’t you build in a little insurance for 20 years down the road?

The entire promise that no human has been cloned is suspect anyway. The only thing we can say for sure is that there’s no public record of it. But it’s been possible for quite some time and the likelihood that nobody has ever done it anywhere seems quite low. It’s way less ethical to artificially modify the genome of a human, and we know that’s happened already.

"It’s way less ethical to artificially modify the genome of a human"

It is? You are talking about the various attempts to treat illness in this way, or something else?

What sort of person is willing to murder a close relative and harvest their body for organs? I've never heard of that happening with anybody and an identical twin, even one raised apart from them. I think this is even less likely in the cloning for organs scenario given that you'd have to bring someone into the world and raise them from birth intending to murder them later.

Though of course if you can clone just a liver, say, that's a different issue and that might very well be the main source of clonings in the future.

This is actually the plot of The Island [1]

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399201/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_44

I'm not sure we know whether anybody has or not.

Technically speaking if you can do sheep ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep) ) , then it's probably just a matter of time before a human attempt would 'succeed'. Though bear in mind the clone is likely to have genetic problems due to the process.

In a lot of countries it's deemed unacceptable to attempt/illegal to attempt it. So if you had succeeded you are unlikely to be trumpeting the fact.

Also practically - why? What is the point? Perhaps a deluded billionaire thinks the world would be better off with an army of themselves? Dunno.

Perhaps the most logical use would be as a walking spare parts bank for said billionaire - again you wouldn't advertise you are doing that....

Remember natural clones - identical twins and up, are not actually that rare - 1 in 65 births in the UK is a multiple one, with a 1/3 of those being identical.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/what-causes...

"why? What is the point?"

A government or something with similar power wants to "improve" their society via eugenics. It's vastly more efficient with cloning.

If you had a science driven eugenics programme then the scientist would say a population with identical genomes in all respects is an accident waiting to happen ( think everyone killed in a global pandemic for example because of identical immune systems.... ) - ie not 'genetically' fit. ( The scientist also might question whether the goal is actually achievable - nevermind ethical ).

Also depends on what you mean by cloning - if you wanted to create lots more twins then actually you could probably trivially do it today by following the existing twin process - ie viable embryo and splitting at early stage. ( https://academic.oup.com/humupd/article/23/2/156/2527545 ) That would be 'cloning' and give you a identical base genetic background on which to start making changes.

However most people consider cloning to be taking adult cell DNA and creating a new viable embryo from that - which is tricky to do without genetic damage.

The reason people want to do the second nuclear transfer approach is they want to select the DNA to used based on adult characteristics - ie you only know Mozart was Mozart when he grew up not when he was an egg.

However in my view that kind of eugenic thinking is deeply flawed.

"a population with identical genomes in all respects"

I'm not advocating this sort of thing, but that's an extreme straw man and neither what I was describing nor what anyone would do. Some country with say, a billion people, could make a million clones of the smartest person in the country, and who knows what else, and still have 99% of the pre-existing diversity.

Assuming all the suppositions about these clones all being smart ( however you define that ) are true.

Then do you really think these million people will be working for you???? :-)

Or will it be the other way around....

I don't have any knowledge of how to brainwash smart people, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

The biggest ethical issue with cloning and genetic manipulation generally in humans is it's essentially experimenting on a human subject that can't consent and will have life long health impacts from the process.

But we could also apply that same ethical argument to an unborn baby, either genetic manipulation or abortion.

And abortion is an extremely touchy subject partially for that reason, the question of who gets to choose and who gets protected is kind of the core of the debate, along with when a person is made.

With GE though it's less messy because there's definitely a second person at the end of a GE'd baby (that's the whole goal of doing it after all) that's completely separate from the mother/parents.

From an evolutionary perspective, cloning is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot. Why would you do that to the population?

The more similar genes are, the easier it is for a single pathogen to kill all those that share those genes.

Cloning has its pros and cons, that's why it exists in the natural world. An obvious advantage of cloning is that a successful variant can spread faster.

A few clones are okay from this point of view, an army of them is not.

But who cares about clones, engineered humans would be much more useful, potentially.

> in for example fiction

So, say "clones" instead of "twins".

There's a lot of Star Trek episodes about this, the main thing that they say is it basically automatically makes a class of expendable humans who will eventually becomes subservient.

Cloning isn't a photocopier. You don't just hit print and get a bunch of adult humans with blank, docile eyes.

Putting aside, um, "assembly", what makes feeding, housing, educating (at least to worker-bee levels), etc. them cheaper, easier or faster than the normal way of getting new productive humans?

How about same sex couples who wish to have offspring without a 3rd party's DNA in the mix?

Perhaps not exactly cloning? In any case, this should arguably be legal.

Is it possible to get XY from XX and XX?

The Y chromosome has almost no genetic information. So if you acquired one, even from someone else, it would be practically irrelevant.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/y-chromosome-m...

Yes, but not a healthy boy. The opposite is doable instead. (By using parts of the other X chromosome.)

Working in technology offers the opportunity to learn that just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should. Also, watch Altered Carbon if you're interested in how this could play out.

Altered Carbon is about cloning yes, but in conjunction with an ability to transfer a consciousness from body to body, and an ability make backups of a human consciousness somehow "in a cloud". That was the main reason for the apparently morally questionable outcomes presented in Altered Carbon, not the cloning itself. Great series BTW, a large proportion of HN crowd is likely to enjoy it.

I think a big part is the balance between a scientist/doctor wanting to be "first" to achieve this, and the fear that something will go wrong. With a human clone, you'd basically have to monitor it for 35+ years (really, monitor a population) to make any sort of statements about the absence of unexpected health effects.

Around 2000's there has been couple of claims from company called Clonaid[1] that they successfully cloned numerous babies. It has never been confirmed to be true though.

My humble and amateurish opinion is that cloning is happening in some degree, especially in China[2], but on very experimental basis.

It's very surprising to me how little media coverage the topic of cloning gets. I would be really interested in a podcast/interview about the latest development in this area.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonaid

2. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/dec/05/c...

Clonaid is tied to a ufo cult so I doubt they have much credibility.

The simple answer is "because it'd be a hassle".

Just look at He Jiankui post-crispr babies. Sentenced to 3 years in prison. 3 million dollar fine. Ostracized from the scientific community. It's just not worth it.

Yet. Wait until we figure out the way to prevent serious diseases.

Cloning pets is a thing: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/style/barbra-streisand-cl...

The main issue with cloning humans is that it is controversial and legally frowned upon in most countries. That means that if it's happening, all parties involved have a big incentive to keep it a secret. Also, it likely involves a lot of money as it is risky and there are only so many scientists willing to risk their careers.

Morals aside, the main technical challenge with human cloning is the high failure rate in terms of the numbers of less than perfect clones with defects that would have to be euthanized. But it's not fundamentally harder or different from cloning sheep or pets. Of course high failure rates are also a challenge with IVF births. However, this seems to be far less controversial. Most non viable IVF embryos simply don't make it to the womb (i.e. get discarded before implantation) or fail in a early stage. Some couples try for years before succeeding. I doubt it would be very different with cloning. Finding women willing to carry the child is another challenge. With IVF it's typically (but not necessarily) the 'natural' mother who gets her own eggs implanted back opting into this. With clones this might be less practical as the mothers might be a combination of too old/dead/unwilling so you'd need some woman to carry the child (probably in exchange for cash).

When it comes to animals, we simply care less about all this. Once the technical issues around this are addressed the remaining moral issues will have more to do with religious/philosophical concerns than any practical concerns. The whole boys from Brazil thing is going to keep this controversial for a long time after most technical concerns are addressed no matter what.

Yet, there's no shortage of wealthy hedonistic / narcissistic types that are likely to want this no matter what. So it's more of a case of when than if and you have to wonder how far in the past 'when' is going to be exactly. I guess we'll find out when people start discovering they have genetically identical twins of different ages in gene databases in a few years.

It is possible this hasn’t happened. The final step of implanting an embryo in a human still involves a lot of trial and error. In IVF it is basically fired into the uterus and fingers are crossed. There us quite a high threshold for getting an embryo to implant in humans compared to animals.

Also, I think it would be quite difficult to eventually explain to your kid that you cloned them.

I'm pretty interested in the morals/law discussion we'll need to have soon when we have creation of embryos without needing exactly two parents, plus the ability for the embryo to develop to term in an artificial uterus (no humans needed). There are so many questions here that we just don't have precedent for!

If I were to clone a human, I would wait until it had developed into a fully formed, healthy adult before even thinking about announcing it to the world.

It seems somewhat likely to me that a human has been cloned, perhaps by many governments, and just kept secret.