00:00Welcome to Future Proof, where I nerd out about classic sci-fi staples and their real-world
00:05counterparts.
00:06I'm your host, the result of Michael Swaim cloning himself to harvest organs from, but
00:11then eventually swapping every single body part with the cloned ones, including brain,
00:16skin, and, in a real feat of surgeon-earing, skeleton bones.
00:20So I guess I'm like, halfway between being the real Swaim and a Swaim clone?
00:25Philosophers are baffled.
00:26All I know for sure is, he forgot the penis.
00:30Or kept it for himself intentionally, but why would he want two?
00:34Unless...
00:35Oh!
00:36Of course!
00:37The vagina-shaped locks on the vault door!
00:40He can trade the penises for more information about where to find the matching keys!
00:44Damn.
00:45I'm always one step ahead of me.
00:47The line between a clone and an evil twin, doppelganger, or mirror-self can get blurry
01:01sometimes in fiction, but the science behind realistic cloning was actually pretty well
01:06understood long before pop culture caught up.
01:09Hans Dreisch split up a two-celled sea urchin embryo and grew both into identical sea urchins
01:15all the way back in 1885.
01:17By 1931, Aldous Huxley had published the sci-fi classic Brave New World, featuring
01:22a society separated into castes based on the quality of the genes people were cloned from.
01:28Nevertheless, most video games, movies, and shows still choose to completely fudge cloning
01:33into something much simpler, because it's a lot more fun to cast the same actor twice
01:38and let them bounce off themselves than it is to watch them play against an egg fertilized
01:43with their own DNA.
01:44My first exposure to the idea was in Calvin and Hobbes.
01:47All that process required was a cardboard box with the word duplicator written on the
01:51side.
01:52Naturally, I tried it with my own box with Timely Reference written on the side, but
01:56when I opened it up, it was still just full of my old Herman's Hermit concert tees and
02:00jorts.
02:01And jarts, if I'm being honest.
02:04But I didn't want to say that because it sounds so much like jorts, and I was worried
02:06you'd think I was making this all up.
02:08But I'm not.
02:09From light, bubbly fun, like the Prestige, to the brooding angst of multiplicity, we
02:14really seem to like to imagine human cloning as just a Xerox machine, or else a teleporter
02:20that spits out a copy of the person but keeps the original.
02:23Incidentally, the episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Riker's teleporter
02:27beam gets refracted and spits out a clone predates the Prestige by 13 years.
02:33Eat it, Tesla.
02:34Go fall in love with a pigeon.
02:35I think part of this has to do with the human urge to examine and understand ourselves,
02:41which a clone is a handy story device, and part of it has to do with the fact that twins
02:45and mirrors already exist.
02:47Not to mention, we've been cloning plants since 1954, and Friedrich Miescher identified
02:52DNA as the body's instructions for building a human back in freakin' 1869, dawg.
02:59For some perspective, that's the same year treason charges against Jefferson Davis were
03:03dropped.
03:04It was so long ago that the US legal system gave a racist insurrectionist ex-president
03:10a total pass.
03:11How times change.
03:12In stories featuring full-on pixel-perfect clonal copies, there are a few ways you can
03:18go, all of which say something about identity.
03:21What forms us.
03:22Nature vs. Nurture.
03:23There's stuff like Horizon Zero Dawn, the Spider-Man clone saga, and Metal Gear series,
03:28where genes basically dictate the shape of your fate, determining the type of person
03:32you are or lifestyle that you're drawn to.
03:34In Metal Gear, Snake's genetic destiny even comes down to which genes were recessive and
03:39dominant in that clone's particular case.
03:42And look, I'm not saying that these stories promote eugenics, but I'm not not saying
03:47that either.
03:48In the Star Trek universe, cloning and genetic modification have been illegal ever since
03:52modified mutants tried to take over the galaxy, as if having your genes tampered with can't
03:56help but turn you into a villain.
03:58Or maybe you were a villain already, and cloning is just a handy way to pump out thousands
04:02of expendable henchmen like the clone army from Star Wars.
04:06Or the bad guys clones from Judge Dredd.
04:08It's probably the most basic view of cloning a story can adopt, which is just that clones
04:13are unnatural and the original is always the good version.
04:16Then there's the stories on the opposite end of the spectrum.
04:19On the nurture side, I'm talking about stuff like Picard's clone in Star Trek Nemesis or
04:24Q-Bert from Futurama.
04:26These clones act so differently from their originator that their story becomes one about
04:30how much life can change you, no matter where you started out.
04:33I was born on the set of a talking head YouTube history show, and look how far I've come.
04:38Science now.
04:39Finally, there are stories where clones represent a confounding of identity itself.
04:43Am I less special if there's another me out there?
04:46Or, big twist, if I turn out to be the copy.
04:50Man, that must have been such a good twist.
04:52The first time someone dropped it?
04:54You know, before Hitman Codename 47 and the Sixth Day and the Venture Brothers.
04:59And John dies at the end in Annihilation and Rick and Morty.
05:03Turns out, we all feel like a fraud sometimes.
05:06So finding out there's a more real you out there is a story we return to a lot.
05:11I'm looking at you, Jeremy Allen White.
05:13Give us back Gene Wilder's head, you monster.
05:16Speaking of monsters, I think we can all agree that one movie probably taught the bulk of
05:21us how in vitro fertilization and cloning actually work.
05:25Jurassic Park.
05:27Thank you, Mr. DNA.
05:29It's kind of weird that you aren't a doctor, but we love you anyway.
05:32And historically, cloning hasn't been much more complicated than Spielberg made it out
05:36to be.
05:37For example, in 1928, Hans Spemann forced a salamander egg to produce clones just by
05:43tying a baby's hair around the egg as the cells split to push some of the nuclei into
05:48a separate little area.
05:50Naturally, he had to perform the act many, many times to verify the results, and we thank
05:54all the bald babies who sacrificed so much in the name of science.
05:58Of course, that kind of cloning is a lot easier to pull off with animals that are already
06:02parthenogenetic, which means they produce an egg that doesn't need to be fertilized
06:07to produce offspring.
06:09Parthenogenetic animals include aphids, tapeworms, jellyfish, marmor crabs, boa constrictors,
06:15lizards, wasps, and sponges, including the ones with square pants.
06:19And I know what you're thinking.
06:20The fuck is a marmor crab?
06:22Look, man, I just copy and paste Wikipedia and add jokes, okay?
06:26It's probably an eel or something, I don't know.
06:28As technology and biology have both advanced, we've naturally started cloning more and
06:33more complicated stuff, and in more and more sophisticated ways.
06:37At first, scientists mimicked the natural process as much as possible, isolating undifferentiated
06:43embryonic cells to implant in a surrogate egg, kind of like intercepting the fetus and
06:47passing it off to another womb.
06:49What was so huge about Dolly the sheep, cloned in 1996, was that she was cloned from a differentiated
06:54adult cell's nucleus, which is much, much harder to do.
06:58So much that she was the only embryo brought to term out of 277 attempts.
07:04That's a lot of sheep f***ing.
07:06The next year, we cloned a primate.
07:08And in 2013, the biology team under Shaukrat Mitalipov were able to create a cloned human
07:13embryo that could serve as a source of stem cells to treat the original person, a fetus
07:18with a rare genetic disorder.
07:20Each step of cloning is slow going, and mired in philosophical and ethical debate, as it
07:25probably should be.
07:26But ultimately, that's not the reason we don't clone people.
07:29Let's face it, if humans can do something profoundly stupid using science, the fact
07:34that it's amoral isn't going to stop us.
07:37It's actually a big challenge cloning primates and humans because our spindle proteins, which
07:42are essential for cell division, are so closely connected to the nuclei of our cells that
07:46when they try to pluck one out, they usually ruin the other part.
07:50Once they figure that out though, boom.
07:53Clone your grandma.
07:54And you know it's true, because there are already companies like Viagin, who will clone
07:58your dead cat or dog for 50 grand, or if you're really splurging, clone you up a horse for
08:0485.
08:05Hell, we'll throw in two pigs and a camel for 118.
08:08ALL CLONES MUST GO!
08:11So yes, cloning is a fascinating field with the potential to open up full new ways to
08:15treat organ failure and genetic diseases, and even potentially safeguard endangered
08:20species or resurrect extinct ones.
08:23Not dinosaurs though, real life isn't cool enough for that.
08:26They'll probably bring back this guy.
08:27What the hell even are you?
08:29You look like a squid mated with a jart.
08:31But enough about you, the audience.
08:34Me, Michael Swayne, am done now.
08:36Toss me a like and comment down below, letting me know what other sci-fi tropes you'd like
08:40me to cover, and I'll see you next time on Future Proof.
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