Ender wrote:The problem with cloned replacement organs/limbs is the aging process. You need the limbs for a 20 year old in a few hours, so you need to adjut the rate at which the cells grow so that they will be ready then. The problem is that the cells will keep growing at that rate inside the persons body, making them useless in short time.
Nope. Some embryo cells divide much faster than adult cells ( over 20 times faster, embryo cells can divide in less than one hour while adult ones can do it every 24/48 h - under standard conditions, liver cells divide once every year ! ). It is a matter of controlling the mitotic rate thanks to some specific genes.
I suspect it could be done with introducing a number of mitosis-enhancing genes into the cloned cells, then splicing them out with suppression techniques ( known to current science, though not applicable to whole organisms with our current technology AFAIK ) or methyling them ( I don't know if it's proper English, but I do know that putting some methyl groups on certain cytosin and guanin sequence will definitely inhibit the expression of a nearby gene ).
All cells do not express the same genetic information, and a given cell will not express the same genes during its entire life. It is not that far fetched to assume that SW technology can introduce genes that will be used only during the original growth process, then suppress or silence them ( say, once a certain metabolite, not normally found in the human body, is no longer provided ). Such natural processes are encountered in biology today ( or did you think that your neural cells would generate haemoglobin or dystrophin
? Or that an adult muscle cell would express the myoD1 gene which is required only during the earlier stages of life ? ).
Thus your objection is not valid.
Darth Wong wrote:Although it should be pointed out that we don't entirely understand this whole "midichlorian" business. If those things are not present in cloned tissue, then a Sith Lord would be better off keeping mangled and cybernetically enhanced organs than replacing them with cloned ones.
Why wouldn't they be present in cloned tissue ? As long as they are present in the original cell(s) that's (are) being used for cloning purposes, it should not be problematic. The same goes for mitochondria : they are shared between the two cells resulting from mitosis.
Besides, one of the Jedi padawans in
Darksaber or the Young Jedi series IIRC was a clone. Another EU novel has IIRC Force-sensitive clones, though I do not remember which.