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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

I bet identical twins REALLY turn your stomach too.

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.

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

How would this be racism?

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

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.

putting the "pre" in prejudice.

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

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...

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

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...

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.

>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.

Are you also scared of twins?

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.

How do you know you aren't a clone?

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