Human Cloning

One thing to remember is that unlike SF cloning, normal cloning will produce a baby that grows normally, regardless of the age of the donor -- not so effective for an army. You could have other tech that could circumvent it, but then you'd wonder why it wasn't being used on people who were conceived in other ways.

Here's methods I've seen/thought of:
-- You want a kid. Adoption isn't an option because you want it to be genetically yours. If the tech's cheap enough that it's the same price as a visit to a sperm/egg bank, then it might be an option. Or just for people who want to raise someone very like themselves.
-- A kid exists, and you want another. I've seen at least two plots involving cloning a young noble/royal character so you can swap the double in. One was helpful (a perfect body double for a royal family member), and one was harmful (a trained assassin that looks exactly like a noble's heir). In both cases, the cloning was done at a young age, so by the time the original hit adulthood, the clones looked about the same age. You could also use this to really muck up lines of succession on a planet that doesn't have rules about clones.
-- You somehow think the world needs another Insert-Historical/Religious-Person-Here and you have a tissue sample. Best for the Messianic cults and other such people.

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I'm a grad student in astronomy, so feel free to PM me with any sort of astronomy/planetary science/space questions, and I'll try and help.

Oh yes, unlike the clones in Star Wars and The Island, my clones would definitely begin as babies and age at a normal rate. I guess I should have mentioned that in the first place. My story takes place on Earth within about a hundred years or less from now so the science has to be the same or reflect what could be possible in our world.

My two main characters are Zeccariah and Witt. Long story short, Witt is Zec's clone and he doesn't know it yet. I haven't decided yet if I want the story to take place form Zec's point of view or from Witt's. I've also toyed with the idea that Zeccariah is also a clone and doesn't know it, hehehe. It gets a little complicated. The two of them are basically guinea pigs for a whole series of clones that are to follow them.

I just need some good motivation as to why they were cloned in the first place.

"It is better to have tried and lost than to have never known what it is like to have given your best."

A couple of possibilities may lie in the realm of tissue and organ transplants. Though we're already on a path to being able to clone some tissues, the development and genetic complexity of many organs means a whole person may turn out easier to clone, though that itself has presented a rather sticky problem with respect to the resetting of the molecular clock needed to produce a healthy clone that ages and develops normally.

One interesting loophole to play with is the question of personhood, in the legal sense. Currently this is summed up in U.S. law in the Roe v. Wade decision. You've gotta be born and viable outside the womb at birth to be a person entitled to the rights of the 14th Amendment of the constitution. But if a caveat of being meiotically reproduced was added (as one of a number of possible requirements), clones could form a slave class. In a service based economy with a shrinking population base this could be useful.

Vanity or a ready supply of body doubles for a weathly/powerful heir could be a motive for cloning if it's done in childhood or at time of fertilisation. Of course, clones of a zygote are effectively artificially produced twins, though if frozen for a time they could be different ages. It could be a practice of the wealthy to clone their embryos before implanting their IVF babies, to hold by as possible future tissue and organ donors or simply as future children if they like the way the first one turned out. Imagine quadruplets but stair-stepped in age.

Something to keep in mind when dealing with cloning :

Your body ages because there is a part of your genes that become shorter and shorter with every cell division. When they get too short, you die. (I'm over-simplifying, because I don't know the details, but that's basically what happens).

So, if you clone a thirty-years old, you'll get a baby, who will grow up and all, but his cells will be thirty-years old at birth, and so he'll get aging problems thirty years sooner than he should.

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Some options:
1) Something actually wrong with reproduction (mass sterility; rampant genetic disease; Aeon Flux movie; Handmaid's Tale; etc)
2) (Wealthy) women can't be bothered with pregnancy, so cloning becomes a fashionable alternative
3) Clones as a slave class because they lack personhood / souls by virtue of birth method (Star Wars, Friday, etc)
4) Clones as a slave class because they lack humanity by virtue of genetic modification (3% difference from "human" DNA in chimpanzees; Monsanto seed intellectual property; etc)
5) Clones as government intervention to balance gender pool once society has over-selected against men (militant feminism gone wrong) or against women (Chinese "one child" law gone wrong) leading to a scarcity that threatens the stability of a nation.

Someone might want a clone if they have a child that has been born with a debilitating condition and needs organ replacement. A clone of that child would be able to produce that and if the child was very young that age difference with the clone wouldn't matter too much.

I don't think human cloning is overdone but I think the science is often wrong. If you're talking about a technology level similar to our own, remember how many failures it would take to make one successful clone. You might want to look up Dolly the sheep, especially if you're interested in failure rates and any aging problems that the clone might have.

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2006: A Measure of Life - Won!
2007: The Scold's Bridle
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Theoretically, some point in the future, it might be possible to drastically genetically modify people. If that happens, it's possible that that could come to be viewed as the "perfect human", and it would be seen as advategous to simply have cloned chilren instead of naturally conceived ones.

Number of times the evil villian has replicated himself:4
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Thanks for all the ideas everyone. Keep them coming if you have them. This is all good food for thought. A lot of you have brought up ideas I had considered and also some points I hadn't thought about.

Thanks Everyone!

"It is better to have tried and lost than to have never known what it is like to have given your best."

I personally find both the clone and cloned to have interesting POVs. It depends a lot on your story but to discover that you're not unique would hurt on some very deep levels. Especially if you can find some conflict that forces them to oppose one another rather than slowly, carefully build a relationship. I tend to think of this as having some things in common with adoption (possibly b/c I discovered as an adult I was adopted and my biol parents eventually married and had six kids!).

It's quite striking to discover you have things in common with someone you've never met, esp if they closely resemble you physically. Can give you eerie feelings, a wish for distance, to re-establish yourself as just you, not like them, they're nothing to do with me. For my biol siblings, I know they strugged with identity issues too, for instance the eldest said something about being the oldest, then stopped short and looked at me, since I was born a few years before. Interesting to re-think your position in life like that.

On the specific issue of cloning, the who came first would, I think, be a real debate between the two. It would be a great point to reverse at the end - if one of them felt he was the *true* original and therefore superior, or entitled to more rights, an inheritance, whatever, and then discovered he was actually the clone - is he a different person than he was ten minutes ago? Like a racist finding out they have 'tainted' blood. Some great opportunities there for character development.

That's what I was talking about when I said there were problems with resetting the molecular clock. Cloning a zygote (fertilised egg), however, avoids these issues.

2. you need surrogates for that, not cloning. A clone still needs a womb. An artificial womb could carry a clone, but could carry a meiotically reproduced embryo, too.

Cloning isn't a birth method, it's a method of producing a zygote.

Also, India has a far more severe gender imbalance than China, simply because they favor sons so much more than daughters and sex-based abortion, though illegal, is widespread.

Concerning Nathan Whitmore's comment about the creation of the Perfect Human:

This is an idea I've toyed with quite a bit. I think that I've come to the decisions that the antagonist's desire for a world in which only "perfect humans" exist is what drives his actions. He hopes that by reproducing perfect humans much of the worlds corruption will be eliminated. A world that is filled with perfect humans can only become a more perfect world. He's not wanting to weed out imperfect people, he just wants the next several generations to consist of these cloned Perfections, adopted into normal society.

I think this is going to be the main motivation for the clonings, but others reasons could exist. Keep the ideas coming if you have any more.

Thanks

"It is better to have tried and lost than to have never known what it is like to have given your best."

Other reasons for cloning: absence of fathers (for example, husbands are killed in battle) or absence of mothers (plague affects more women than men)

Theoretically, some point in the future, it might be possible to drastically genetically modify people. If that happens, it's possible that that could come to be viewed as the "perfect human", and it would be seen as advategous to simply have cloned chilren instead of naturally conceived ones.

I've never found that one terribly convincing, to be honest. Good luck convincing a quarter of the population of a small backwoods town that a given type of person is "perfect," never mind a nation of tens or hundreds of millions of people. It's too utterly subjective and impossible to get a consensus on; what's the skin colour of the "perfect human," for instance?

If you add in transhumanist leanings that would be implied in drastic genetic modification, it becomes less likely, not more, since you'd have the body plan branching off in all sorts of odd directions. And, of course, each of the clones would end up somewhat different when they grew up anyway, depending on environment, whims, injuries or illnesses, etc.

I can see cloning happening for a variety of reasons, but imposing homogeneity is one of the few I can't really see at all.

2. The offspring could still be clones. The point is to obtain a "child" that is genetically related to you without personally being pregnant, not that cloning is an alternative to pregnancy.

Whether it is India or China or any other nation isn't the point - the point is that a population can systematically select against either gender, and does so at its peril. I used China because I suspect many more people have heard of the issue w.r.t. China than have heard of its prevalence in India.

Other sci-fi-ish reasons to undertake cloning on a massive scale: an experiment of some kind that requires thousands / millions of genetically identical specimens - perhaps related to finding a cure for cancer, or the dirty underbelly of an industry such as pharmaceuticals.