Cloning, Mammoths, and Why We're Just Fancy Flies
Human cloning progress is slow, with only 10% success rate. Ethical concerns abound, from health risks to identity issues. Pet cloning is a lucrative business. Potential benefits include regenerative medicine and de-extinction.
If you had told me a few years ago that we’d be talking about cloning pets for the price of a flashy sports car, I’d have called you a lunatic. I mean, cloning? That’s the stuff of mad scientists in B-movies, or, at best, a weird science experiment with frogs and sheep. But here we are. Today, you can fork out a fortune and get Fido or Fluffy 2.0, a genetic carbon copy, fresh from a lab in China or the United States. If that doesn’t sound like science fiction enough for you, well, then maybe you’ve already binge-watched too many dystopian dramas on Netflix.
Let’s start with the basics because I know you might be thinking, “This all sounds like a bit of technical gibberish to me.” So, allow me to unpack it. According to Diego Claudio Cortez Quezada, a bright spark over at UNAM’s Center for Genomic Sciences, human cloning is still in its infancy, and by that, I mean it’s about as successful as me trying to assemble flat-pack furniture. To put it bluntly, the success rate of cloning humans is a measly 10 percent. Yes, you read that right. If you had a dozen embryos lined up, only one might—just might—make it through the gauntlet of developmental stages.
