Send in the Clones

back for future episodes. And today we wanted to talk about, well, you know, we've we've started a couple of episodes talking about movies, and I had one I wanted to tell you about movies have all the best ideas about the future. Well, often you get movies that are science fiction where people are you know, they have to think about the future. That's kind of what the whole environment of the film is set in. So I wanted to talk about a

great movie, Parts the Clonus Horror. Parts of the Clonus Horror, which of one of those wonderful films featured on Mystery Science Theater three thousands, and I full disclosure, that's how I first saw Parts of the Clonus Horror was the MST three k riffing of that film. But the premise of that film was one of those science fiction horror

premises that you can you can easily imagine. I mean, there's as technology has developed over time, there are certain ethical questions have arisen, things like, you know, should we give robots rights? We talked about that in the previous episode. Well parts of the clonus Hard took a different approach.

It said, let's assume that we perfect cloning, so we can make perfect clone copies of other creatures, to the point where we can even age them appropriately so that they are of a particular size, say to be like attractive actors from the nineteen seventies in southern California. You're being really generous with attractive but yes, so uh But anyway, the purpose of this would not be so that we could you know, copy the best and brightest so that

we have twice as many of them. Not like that. No, the idea is more about wealthy and powerful people wanting to have a kind of a life insurance policy where if they if they need a new organ, they can just harvest one from their clone, because they'll be identical to the person who needs the donation. You know, it just all comes back to Oregon harvest. Yeah, just because it comes down to organ roads lead to stealing people's organs.

When it gets to the future, these poor clones waking up in a bathtub somewhere and it's full of ice and on written on the mirrors, go to a doctor. Well, I think I don't recall exactly. I think the movie implies that they are just put you know, they're they're they're harvested for whatever parts are needed, and then they're destroyed.

And although in the movie, within the the the cloness community in the movie they call it going to America, and also the general public in the film is unaware of this, this entire program, it's something that only the very rich and powerful have access to. So it's another it's a social divide as well as a horror story because it's the idea of this, this elite cast of people who are very wealthy or very politically influential have

access to. Well, yeah, that's There are different kinds of of negative future depictions, right, there's the conspiracy depiction versus the dystopian. Both of them are in this this particular film, so not necessarily executed perfectly But what's also interesting is that, you know, in two thousand five a movie came out called The Island and UH didn't see it either, had you and McGregor in it and Scarlett Johanson. But anyway,

so the film came out. I remember seeing the preview for the movie, and as soon as I saw the preview, I thought, Huh, this looks like it's an oregan harvesting clone story a lot like Clonus the you know, are parts of the closes? Yeah, exactly, I'm just gonna horror Clonus parts parts the Clone Is Horror, And I thought, wow, it seems really similar. And I was not the only one. The producers of Parts of The Clone Is Horror end up suing DreamWorks, which was the studio behind The Island.

Uh that eventually settled out of court, So I was not the only person to think that it was a very similar premise. So this kind of late leads us to a discussion about cloning. Is this the future? Just straight up, John, No, it makes no sense. No, no, because there are better ways. But let's let's talk about what cloning is and why we wouldn't have a community of replicas of ourselves. So that we could just go

in and we keep them nice and stupid. Okay, well let me say what I think cloning is based on the movies. Okay, it's where you go into a big room full of machines that go bleep bleep boopp and they scan you. Right, so they like like a like a laser kind of thing, moves over your body, right, and then there's a machine next to you. It looks

like a big like meat freezer. Yeah, and then the door opens and a copy of you steps out of it that's the same age you are and looks just like you, and then tries to steal your identity and you're locked into a struggle to the death with your evil twins. Uh. You know, is that basically correct? That is basically as wrong as it possibly could be. Yes, it turns out cloning is not anything like that. So what does cloning actually mean to a scientist? There are

three different types of cloning to a scientist. Okay, so you've got you've got embryo cloning, which is essentially that's what happens in nature when we see people who are twins, identical twins, or triplets, or any any variation thereof that's embryonic cloning. That's just the natural cloning. So in other words, what happens with that case is that you have an embryo that forms some cells may split off from that embryo and form another viable embryo. Both of them end

up growing into babies and are eventually born. Twins are essentially clones. They are genetically identical, they have the same DNA. You know. Something that's interesting, though, is that even monozygotic twins who are copied from exactly the same chromosomes don't end up exactly the same. That's true. That's true. That which kind of tells you that there are lots of different factors that go into determining what makes a person a person. It's not just your DNA. Also, you could

argue it's not just your environment. It's a much more complex issue, right, So that's that's the first one. Then there's reproductive cloning. Now, reproductive cloning means you're trying to reproduce a particular organism. So, Joe, if I took like a whole organism, yeah, like you, Like, if I wanted to clone you, that would be reproductive cloning. I would end up taking one of your cells, and I would remove the nucleus from that cell. And I wouldn't by

that time the pain has already passed. But you know it's it's the semantic cell. I would take a semantic cell from your body. I would take the nucleus out of the semantic cell. I would take an egg cell

where the nucleus had already been removed. I would implant the eggs cell with the nucleus of the semantic cell I took from you, and then I would stimulate the eggs cell so that it would end up developing into an embryo, which would eventually be implanted into some sort of gestation surrogate, so a woman who would be willing to carry a baby to term. The baby would be born, and that would be the clone of you, Joe. So you don't step out of like a freezer full of

dried eyes. No, that would not happen you. You are literally born just like other organisms are born. Well, yeah, the clone would be born just like any other organism. Now, although there are definitely some issues which will will chat about as well, but I can go ahead and go into a little bit of it. Uh turns out that most clones tend to have a shorter lifespan than the animal that they were cloned from, and also they tend

to be prone to genetic issues. So it's because they're not you know, it's not the same thing is as twins, you're taking a nucleus from an adult animal and then or adult organism I guess I should say, and then using that to create a new organism. There can be some issues that develop out of that where you have

some pretty severe genetic problems down the line. Now I really don't know what causes that is that is that sort of the way that over time, as you become an adult, you accumulate mutations and genetic like a little screw ups that happened to your genes. That's part of it. The fact that telomeres are getting shorter and shorter, and you know, they're not regenerating over time. There's there are a lot of different reasons why this is a case.

It's one of the reasons why it's considered to be and a very ethical gray area in science and most scientists I think maybe I shouldn't even say most many scientists think that reproductive cloning is not a very ethical, uh pursuit. Okay, So reproductive cloning, is this just like in uh, you know, let's say, what if kind of thing. Now, this is something that we've done. Dolly the Sheep. You heard of Dolly the Sheep. Dolly the Sheep was a big fan of Dolly. Dolly. Yeah, Dolly the Sheep was

a clone. So we have had evidence, I mean, the scientists have made clones of organisms, complex organisms, and in fact, cloning is again something that we see in the animal world that happens like on simple organisms do it themselves?

Right with something that we're talking about induced in the laboratory that we have evidence of that, there aren't that many examples because again, uh, the there are some ethical issues where we talk about how if the animal that is produced the clone has these genetic issues or has a shorter lifespan there, Yeah, is it fair? Is it?

Is it? You know, if they're born into a quality of life that is automatically lower than animals that are just naturally reproducing, then is that kind Isn't that cruel? And so there are a lot of questions there and as far as it goes with humans, hasn't been done at all because the ethical questions there are way way more complicated, and we'll get into some of them because

you have to. You have to talk about it. And when you're talking about cloning, the third type of cloning, and this is the type that would really play into any kind of approach to creating organs for transplants, is called therapeutic cloning. Sounds real friendly. Therapeutic cloning is well, on the surface, it's friendly in the sense that instead of trying to create a clone of a person, like

a reproduction of the person. So instead of me trying to clone you, Joe, and then waiting, you know, twenty years for the clone to grow up and not for you to be able to cut that sucker open and harvest all his juicy organs for yourself. Uh, instead of doing that, I would end up taking again a semantic cell from you and harvesting the nucleus from that semantic cell, putting it into an egg cell that had been Uh, it's own nucleus has been removed, already stimulating it just

as I would if it were reproductive cloning. But then once it becomes an embryo, it starts to produce stem cells. Okay, And that's where we started getting into the gray ethical area again, because those stem cells. Stem cells are cells that haven't differentiated yet. They can differentiate into other types of cells, and cells have different levels of potency. Potency kind of describes how many different types of cells the

stem cell could eventually develop into. Um So you know, some are very much limited in what they can develop into and some are have have a much larger spectrum that they can develop into. So plura potent stem cells, that's the kind that we really want to get because they have the greatest variety of cells they can develop into, which means that from this one sort of basic ingredient, you can make lots of different stuff. Renaissance cells, yeah, they can, they can do all sorts of things. Now

once they differentiate, obviously that's the form they take. They don't transform or anything like hard take the form of a liver that doesn't work. So it would be so so working with the stem cells, scientists could end up manipulating them so that they develop into specific types of tissue.

And then now that doesn't help you out just immediately either if I just had a massive cells that developed into heart tissue but weren't in the shape of a heart, that wouldn't do you any good sounds like you need some kind of scaffolding. Yeah, you would absolutely need to have some sort of of scaffolding or or you know, some sort of structure to put this material up against so that it forms into the right shape. So it's not just made of the right stuff, but it's in

the right shape to do the job it needs to do. So, Uh, there are different ways that doctors and engineers are looking into creating that. Sometimes they just will um kind of build a model lung onto some scaffolding. And there's also been some interesting developments in three D printing. We've talked about that in the past two using three D printers to actually print an organ, where it's printing it layer by layer of cells into the right kind of shape

so that you end up with this finished organ. The downside is when you get a printer jam, it's the grossest, it's not pleasant. No, But so you know, I said it was an ethical gray area, and the reason for that is that when you extract these stem cells, the embryo is no longer viable a right, So, uh, if I'm creating a clone of you, Joe, not to reproduce, but to just get so I can get the kind of cells I need to develop whatever organized I want.

There's no way for that embryo to become another person, and you've taken its blueprints, right, and so that's a uh, that's you know, that's one of those ethical issues. There are people who feel that once you reach the embryonic stage, then that's human life and to do anything to harm that human life, even if you were creating that embryo with the express purpose of being able to develop organs for someone who needs a transplant, uh, that is wrong.

And so there, you know, and it's definitely a gray area. Well, there's probably there's some middle ground too. Right, It's not just like you know, either you think that's totally fine or you think that that's equivalent to murder. You might think that like, well, you know, there's some reason to not want to do that if we don't have to write, if there's some other approach we can do to to do this without having to to create the potential and

then extinguish that potential for human life. Now, what about adult stem cells. Now, adult stem cells have a lot of possibilities. They are that you know, you can I would mean not from an embryo. Right, you can get an adult stem cell from you like I could. I could get adult stem cells from you, Joe. And but the the issue there is that adult stem cells tend to not be they don't have as much potency. In other words, they are more limited in the types of

tissues they can become. Uh. There are scientists who are working with them to see if they can expand that, and there's been some promising research on that. So maybe in the future we get around that that issue and it's not an issue at all anymore, which would be fantastic because now we don't even have to have cloning as part of the picture because this doesn't involve cloning. This involves taking stem cells directly so that you can

end up creating whatever, you know, tissue you need. So cloning is out of the picture, which is why I'm not going to talk about it anymore, because this is an episode about cloning. Joe and I refused to be taken off on your non cloning tangent uh as fascinating as the adult stem cell banality. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about cloning. There's um some been some interesting experiments done. There was one that I was

reading about where scientists were taking um mice that had Parkinson's. Essentially, they had a condition that's akin to Parkinson's and people, and they were symptomatic, you know, they showed the symptoms of the condition, and the scientists ended up using a cloning technology to create new neurons cells and then ended up surgically and planning those cells into the mice and

they started showing signs of recovery. So there is some, uh, some promising evidence that cloning, even if if we're not talking about creating full organs for organ transplant, could be used to help with some very serious illnesses and conditions that we don't have a full handle on yet. Now, keep in mind there are other avenues to exploring options

to treat these illnesses and conditions, like genetic study. But it's it's always great to see multiple disciplines concentrating on the same problem because you are increasing your chances of getting a solution to that problem. So, whether it comes through cloning or genetic modification or even some other avenue, it's good that we have multiple ways of coming at

this issue. Uh, they're all so some other problems that we can talk about the of course, the biggest one is this ethical issue where we've got people disagreeing about, you know, the ethics of using embryos in order to get stem cells to create these organs. One side the argument is that, look, a lot of people need organ transplants, so uh, there's back in. We have this article on how stuff Works about using therapeutic cloning for organ transplants.

It's a great article. Kristen Conger wrote it. Highly recommend you go and check that out. Yeah. She she's a great writer. So how stuff Works dot com. Just search therapeutic cloning and it pops right up. It's a really

good read. But one of the facts that she cites is that in two thousand eight, i think it was, there were ninety nine thousand people on a waiting list to get a transplant, whereas in two thousand seven the number of actual transplants performed was somewhere around twenty six thousand. So twenty six thod people actually got transplants, nine thousand people are on the waiting list. Clearly, there's a supply

and demand problem here, right. We don't have enough organs for the people who need organs, and you know, some organs obviously can be donated from one living person to another and both people can remain living. That's great, but there's only a few of those, like you know, a kidney or doing a partial liver transplant or something like that. But you know there are other other organs where that clearly is not an option. So being able to create organs from your same kind of tissue UH would be

really really beneficial. Obviously, Like if I'm able to create an organ Joe from your d n A so that it is as compatible with you as I can possibly make it, then the UH, the chances of your body rejecting that are decreased significantly. They're never zero, but they are decreased much more than they would be if I just found someone who is a suitable donor. But then you know, you run the risk of your body rejecting

the organ. So that's one reason why cloning is is at such a a hot area of study, because it could go really far to alleviating this problem we have where the number of people who need transplants far out number the folks that the actual supply of organs, and out of the organs that are available, there's never a guarantee that that organ is going to be accepted by the body. So being able to address both of those

issues at once is huge. Alright, So this is why I say that the uh, the whole parts of the clone is horror thing that for real. No, it's totally not real. I mean, why would you why would they make that up? Well, I mean, first of all, first

of all, the technology wasn't as developed back then. Second of all, science fiction often, I don't know if you get this, Joe, but science fiction often is going to address actual like social and cultural problems, and they use science fiction as a vehicle to address them without necessarily worrying about if the science itself is solid. Well, one thing that is worth pointing out is that there's a

lot of fear about cloning out there. Sure, people who um, and I don't necessarily blame them for this, Like, if you don't know a whole lot about it, it sounds pretty scary. Well, even if you know a lot about it, you still sit there. And I mean, if someone were to come up to you and say, this isn't natural, it's hard to argue that. Although you could point at nature and say, look, in nature, we have examples of cloning you've got very simple organisms that that's how they reproduce.

You know, it's this it's this cloning kind of mechanism. But pouring that over to more complex organisms gets a little complicated. Even if you were to go so far as to say, look, you wouldn't go up to a woman who has twins and say to her you're a bad mother because what you did was unnatural, because it's ludicrous. That's totally not the case. Totally decision, because that's how that works, right Joe. It's a good thing. Lauren's not here to correct this, right. Um. Anyway, it's it's you know,

that's right, you pressed the twins button. I guess that's how that works. I don't know. I don't have kids. Um. Yeah, the the obviously we're having a lot of fun here, but the the important part of this that, yeah, there are people who feel that the the unnatural element to cloning, uh is a big problem. It may go against not you know, not only whatever ethic old views they have, but if they have certain religious views, it may go

against their religious views. And you know, you can't just um, I mean you could, but you shouldn't just discount people's beliefs when you're when you're pursuing uh, you know, solutions, what you have to do is be able to have a conversation about it and really come to an agreement among as many parties as you possibly can on what

is and isn't ethical. Well, of course, I mean science is sort of made of facts, but it lives in a world of values, exactly right, So we have to be able to balance the that out so that we

can make meaningful use of what knowledge we gain. And so in this case, it's one of those things where I think if we are able to get solutions that use adult stem cells to work as well, yeah, that then we don't have to worry about the cloning issue at all, although of course there's still people who want to do things like um open up cloning as a way to let people have the same pet over and over and over again, although as we've already discussed, it

would not be the same organism, you know, it would never be exactly the same even if you got to look people who like themselves a little bit too much, like they want to have clones of themselves as their children. I'm a narcissist, But at the same time, I also realize what a jerk I am, and I do not want another version of me around. One is enough. I don't want to compete with myself. First of all, that would be exhausting, because I'm awesome. Um, but yeah, it's

that would be something. But but back to the parts the clones, harror, I mean, ultimately, the reason why that movie wouldn't work is because there's no purpose to read reproductive cloning in order to get organs when you can do therapeutic cloning. It would be Therapeutic cloning would be faster, it would be uh, you know, it would you wouldn't have to wait for your clone to grow up to an age where the organs would actually be useful. You

wouldn't have to feed your clone. You wouldn't have to keep your clones sequestered from everybody else so that your clone wouldn't realize that, you know, it was just an organ farm. And that's it. I mean, you know, you don't have the ethical issue of I guess that idea of kills to people who just gratuitously enjoy murders. Yeah, I suppose so, uh, you know, and again, like you're talking about a film that when it was made therapeutic

cloning wasn't really something that people were thinking about. They they were you know, if you were talking about clones, you were talking about the whole body, not like we can just clones. We can clone you, so we get some celves, so we can grow a heart. That heart would grow, it would just grow inside the body of of a of a human that had all the other organs as well, So you know that would never happen. Well, I'm excited about the things we're gonna learn about cloning

in the near future. Yeah, that that should be really learning things like more about you know, the reasons why cloned life forms have shorter lifespans or the reasons why they tend to have more genetic problems. Might teach us more about those genetic problems so that we can address them in and you know otherwise what otherwise would be

healthy individuals. So there's a lot of things to learn medically. Uh, there's also more to learn about again using adult stem cells or even other uh completely alternative means of going about creating artificial organs that somehow have a more likely acceptance rate than just your average donor, or just to really address that massive disparity between the demand and the

supply of organs. So there's there's definitely some really important stuff that we can learn and uh, you know it's it's While it is a very controversial subject, I think it's one that's important to to study and not just run away from. Right. So, um, I completely understand the ethical concerns. I don't necessarily agree with all of them. Um, but then my ethics are probably different from you know, your ethics, Joe. So I just have to come to

something I don't. I don't. I'm just making an assumption that they're not exactly aligned with mine. I think it's only okay to clone one human, and that human's Tim Curry. I can get behind that. There can never be too much Tim Curry. You know. I think I'm gonna go and do a Tim Curry movie marathon. I'm gonna start with, um, the Shadow, and then i'll probably I'll probably move over

to Clue. You know, you got a rocky horror goes in there, but it'll you can't put that first or second, right, that's this maybe a third maybe, and um, I don't know. Home Alone will be in there somewhere. I think it's actually home alone too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah. So anyway, while while I'm planning out my Tim Curry this has much to do with cloning, well we're cloning Curry. Um. While I'm planning that out, I want to recommend to all our listeners make sure you go and check out

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