Ask a Scienceblogger: Cloning

The question offered up to stump those ivory tower eggheads this week, is:

On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?...

Pretty much. I expected it to be both illuminating about the way development proceeds (complicated, as it turns out, and not all that surprising), and socially insignificant. After all, we have been cloning organisms in hothouses and wombs for a long time. The earth still revolves.

What I find much more interesting (not than the biology, though; that's just plain cool), is the standard set of riffs that the popular media and arts use when discussing or presenting cloning, like Arnie's Sixth Day. Somehow, having the same DNA means that you'll get the same mental processes, even though each individual's experiences, both maternal and environmental is necessarily different, and twins somehow manage to overcome this genetic destiny.

Moreover, the "interfering in Gods work" theme that antibiologists commonly employ is also interesting - for its complete incoherence. We intervene in diseases, injuries, famines, and extinctions (in both ways!) all the time. But even hint that we might use cloning technologies to cure nasty genetic diseases, and off they go...

Finally, the confusion between the theory and technology of stem cell cloning and organism cloning indicates that, basically, the last place you ever want to go for knowledge is the media. Hot news, folks - Phillip K. Dick wasn't a science writer. It's as bad as supposing that an early stage zygote has the rights of a viable human being...