Cloning Problem

Rabbit_Games · May 6, 2024

For whatever reason, I was thinking about cloning. We've seen movies where each clone gets progressively worse, etc.
But it occurred to me that it could be argued that you are engaging in a type of cloning when you have a kid. And we already know what kinds of problems can occur when you have a kid with someone who is too close to you in the Gene Pool-- like your sister. So... how bad would a clone be if it's being created with not a close facsimile of you (like your sister) but with you, directly. I know they've cloned other animals thus far, but I'm really curious how that problem is affecting human clone testing.

DickTrickle · May 6, 2024

They're not really the same thing. Cloning would presumably use known good DNA; there shouldn't be much variance from clone to clone or it's not really cloning.

The reason why repeated incest is bad is because it causes recessive traits to be more common since two sets of DNA are combining, which tend to have more negative issues associated with them; you're basically removing the RNG protections that mating with non-relatives gives you. This situation can't occur with cloning because you're working from the same set of DNA repeatedly, not combining it with something else.

Cybsled · May 6, 2024

Most of those movies/shows also work with the presumption of degradation of the DNA in each successive copy due to how they source the DNA sample. For example, rather than use the same "master" sample for every single clone, lots of these productions seem to imply that the next clone batch sample is taken from a clone and that the act of cloning introduces defects or flaws into each subsequent clone.

Ukerric · May 6, 2024

A clone is basically a twin brother/sister, just born later. Now, copy errors do accumulate over time; each person is born with about 50 differences that aren't in the starting DNA of their parents. That sounds a lot, but you have 4 billion bases, 50 errors over 4 billions is peanuts, unless they scramble by chance a meaningful gene.

(by the way, the older you are, the more errors creep up - 50 is an average for the average age of reproduction. If you use your seventy-year-old sperm on that young thot, you get double or triple that amount of mutations. Women's egg have less of a problem - they're made early in the reproductive period, and they stay there, waiting)

As said by Cybsled, the copy errors can be reduced by copying from the original source instead of a previous copy - each clone will have a few alterations, but almost entirely the same ones, and will still resemble the original at a 99.999998% proportion. And by the time you have a significant divergence building up, guess what? You can record the original's full DNA sequence in a file, then use technologies like CRISPR/CAS9 or their successor to fix any measured deviation from the original blueprint.

I suspect the organization/foundation/whatever that is managing to produce the clones will break up long before the copy problem becomes an issue.