So what happened to cloning?

[lance]

My biggest concern with artificial cloning* is the death rate - last I heard, there were still dozens, if not hundreds, of malformed embryos and dying infants for every mammal successfully cloned. I would hope technology has improved since the days of Dolly the Sheep.

The problem with Dolly was that the DNA they used was as 'old' as that of the mother because of telomeres fragmenting after each time they split. The way around this would be to use DNA from a part of the body that doesn't regenerate, like the heart or nervous tissue.

[Ryan Thunder]

Jesus Christ the amount of projection going on in this thread is staggering.

[Broomstick]

The way around this would be to use DNA from a part of the body that doesn't regenerate, like the heart or nervous tissue.

Uh-huh.... you know, those types of cells are also the ones hardest to get dividing again, to make the clone's embryo?

And the deformities and stillbirths are not just because of shortened teleomeres. It's because we don't have a perfect understanding of how to select good candidate cells, nor how to get them dividing again. Either cells that already have damaged are picked, or they're being damaged during processing. In addition to shortened teleomeres.

in other words, Dolly died of premature old age. Some of her fellow cloning attempts never survived long enough to die of premature old age, they died of something else going wrong.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

Jesus Christ the amount of projection going on in this thread is staggering.

Yeah no shit. Very active imaginations. Hell I think if said I had long canines it'd turn into me being a vampire...

Uh-huh.... you know, those types of cells are also the ones hardest to get dividing again, to make the clone's embryo?

And the deformities and stillbirths are not just because of shortened teleomeres. It's because we don't have a perfect understanding of how to select good candidate cells, nor how to get them dividing again. Either cells that already have damaged are picked, or they're being damaged during processing. In addition to shortened teleomeres.

in other words, Dolly died of premature old age. Some of her fellow cloning attempts never survived long enough to die of premature old age, they died of something else going wrong.

That's the main reason I consider cloning to be important. Life extension, quality of life improvement, improved methods of biological manipulation. I've always wondered about the telomeres too, can you add to them or rebuild them?

[Broomstick]

Sure you can - it's a feature of certain types of cancer cells that they have either stopped shortening their teleomeres, or actually increased their lengths. I suspect the trick is restoring the teleomeres without triggering something like cancer or other over-growth disorder.

[someone_else]

yeah, cancers are basically cells with fucked up reproduction regulation systems (telomers are one of many reproduction regulation systems the cells have).

stem cells (cells tasked to reproduce and replace aging cells in a body) for example show some telomerase activity (they do rebuild their telomers) but too slowly to make them really immortal like cancers.
Since normal cells have a lifespan of at most a few years (neural and cardiac tissue notwithstanding), the organism's actual lifespan is more or less the staminal cell lifespan. So if you want to alter lifespan you need to alter staminal cells (and possibly neural and cardiac tissue as well otherwise you get an immortal vegetable after a while)
additional reading if you want your head to explode

It's very likely that anything that we discover on the above can be extremely useful for cloning as well. (and the reverse)

Also, something like an artificial utherus that ensures something better than a fucking 33% implantation success chance would be another thing you'd like to have to not waste buttloads of embryos in the process (and one that doesn't have the EVIL OVERLORD letters carved on it, unlike cloning).


In fact, if we sum it up, more or less all technology and knowledge needed to achieve cloning is very desiderable anyway for lots of other good reasons.
And while it isn't aimed to cloning, it remains instrumental for it.

So yes, there is active research on matters that would make cloning feasible as well as reaching other useful goals, even if cloning per-se isn't a horribly researched area.

properly controlling a female body and looking good in it- like, she wouldn't do the hip movements when walking

That should be due to different anathomy, namely slightly different pelvis shape.
Although I have met women that do not do that, and men that do that (and are not doing it on purpose).

And her voice would sound like yours- the pitch and tone and word differences and whatnot are mostly social and not physical, although there would be some differences due to larynx length or something.

Well, there are plenty of physical factors intervening in voice pitch and tone. How different the voice will sound will depend on how different the skull and nasal cavities and larynx are from the original (yes, you can change your voice with surgery, just google it). Stuff like accent and talking speed, and similar will be the same if the brain is the same.

[JPaganel]

This thread made me think of this:



He clones himself because he is tired of masturbating...