As of now, we cannot unfreeze people who have been cryogenically frozen and successfully revive them. However, we can freeze 5-day-old fertilized eggs and revive them successfully years later. When exactly does an embryo become unrevivable?
Identical twins split at around one week after fertilization, so if it were possible to revive past then, we could freeze one twin and let the other gestate, and effectively clone the gestated twin whenever desired. Since we can artificially induce twinning, then we could give every newly born person the ability to be cloned, seemingly with none of the downsides of current methods of cloning, although with the overhead of IVF treatment, which is substantial.
Is this currently possible under current scientific understanding? Is it more ethical than other methods of cloning? What ethical issues remain? Would anyone even want to do this if it were legally available?
When it becomes roughly rabbit-kidney-sized, I think the answer is, ~12g, so maybe around week 10?
Since we can artificially induce twinning, then we could give every newly born person the ability to be cloned
Sure, they could be ‘cloned’ (once). But it’s a weird scenario. If you freeze development of one embryo but not the other, what motivation would you or the grownup one have to implant it later? (Outside, of course, of agricultural applications like cattle where one could use “sib testing with embryo transfer”—the point would be sib-testing to see how the first sibling performs compared to predictions to decide whether to implant more embryos/clones of it into surrogate mothers.)
Human sib-testing seems like it would be useful, for one thing. There was a post here about cloning great people from the past. We will be able to do that in the future if most moderately-well-off people keep pre-emptive copies.
In theory, this would have the same use cases as typical cloning, with an upfront cost and time delay. The main benefit it has over current cloning tech is that it avoids the health issues for the clones, which currently make it unviable.
We could clone people successfully with no further advances in science, or unusual costs. The ethical issues with cloning are no longer theoretical, if true. This seems like a big deal, but maybe cloning really isn’t much of an ethical issue at all, and few people will be interested.
We will be able to do that in the future if most moderately-well-off people keep pre-emptive copies.
You would get one copy, but why not just use embryo selection instead to shift the population up? The point of cloning in breeding programs is typically to enable a single elite donor to make a huge and disproportionate contribution to the population, when you’ve already started using selection strategies like truncation selection to the top 10%. I hardly need to explain why no such things are at all viable for human populations.
The main benefit it has over current cloning tech is that it avoids the health issues for the clones, which currently make it unviable.
That didn’t seem like it was all that big a deal. Even Dollie’s siblings were fine.
Human cloning hasn’t been tried and found hard, it hasn’t been tried. It’s like CRISPR editing human babies; if your inference from the absence of CRISPR babies pre-He Jiankui was that “gosh, this must be very hard”, you were very wrong. The true problems with human cloning were never any objections about it being super-difficult or hard to figure out. We could get human cloning to work with very little collective research effort. (How much did those Chinese primates cost? A few million bucks?) Compared to many things researchers accomplish… This is one reason why the Raelians weren’t laughed out of the building when they announced they had cloned someone, because the experts knew deep down that a serious effort would definitely succeed. It’s just no one wants to look like a Raelian or eugenicist, and there is little demand compared to more ordinary ways of having kids. (Who wants a clone of themself? Gay couples? No, because then one is left out, they’d rather have gametogenesis so they can have a true genetic child of them both.) So, it doesn’t happen. And it’ll continue on not happening for who knows how long. Lots of things are like that.
As of now, we cannot unfreeze people who have been cryogenically frozen and successfully revive them. However, we can freeze 5-day-old fertilized eggs and revive them successfully years later. When exactly does an embryo become unrevivable?
Identical twins split at around one week after fertilization, so if it were possible to revive past then, we could freeze one twin and let the other gestate, and effectively clone the gestated twin whenever desired. Since we can artificially induce twinning, then we could give every newly born person the ability to be cloned, seemingly with none of the downsides of current methods of cloning, although with the overhead of IVF treatment, which is substantial.
Is this currently possible under current scientific understanding? Is it more ethical than other methods of cloning? What ethical issues remain? Would anyone even want to do this if it were legally available?
When it becomes roughly rabbit-kidney-sized, I think the answer is, ~12g, so maybe around week 10?
Sure, they could be ‘cloned’ (once). But it’s a weird scenario. If you freeze development of one embryo but not the other, what motivation would you or the grownup one have to implant it later? (Outside, of course, of agricultural applications like cattle where one could use “sib testing with embryo transfer”—the point would be sib-testing to see how the first sibling performs compared to predictions to decide whether to implant more embryos/clones of it into surrogate mothers.)
Human sib-testing seems like it would be useful, for one thing. There was a post here about cloning great people from the past. We will be able to do that in the future if most moderately-well-off people keep pre-emptive copies.
In theory, this would have the same use cases as typical cloning, with an upfront cost and time delay. The main benefit it has over current cloning tech is that it avoids the health issues for the clones, which currently make it unviable.
We could clone people successfully with no further advances in science, or unusual costs. The ethical issues with cloning are no longer theoretical, if true. This seems like a big deal, but maybe cloning really isn’t much of an ethical issue at all, and few people will be interested.
You would get one copy, but why not just use embryo selection instead to shift the population up? The point of cloning in breeding programs is typically to enable a single elite donor to make a huge and disproportionate contribution to the population, when you’ve already started using selection strategies like truncation selection to the top 10%. I hardly need to explain why no such things are at all viable for human populations.
That didn’t seem like it was all that big a deal. Even Dollie’s siblings were fine.
Human cloning hasn’t been tried and found hard, it hasn’t been tried. It’s like CRISPR editing human babies; if your inference from the absence of CRISPR babies pre-He Jiankui was that “gosh, this must be very hard”, you were very wrong. The true problems with human cloning were never any objections about it being super-difficult or hard to figure out. We could get human cloning to work with very little collective research effort. (How much did those Chinese primates cost? A few million bucks?) Compared to many things researchers accomplish… This is one reason why the Raelians weren’t laughed out of the building when they announced they had cloned someone, because the experts knew deep down that a serious effort would definitely succeed. It’s just no one wants to look like a Raelian or eugenicist, and there is little demand compared to more ordinary ways of having kids. (Who wants a clone of themself? Gay couples? No, because then one is left out, they’d rather have gametogenesis so they can have a true genetic child of them both.) So, it doesn’t happen. And it’ll continue on not happening for who knows how long. Lots of things are like that.