Editing Clone (section)

==Clones in Real Life==
Cloning, or more precisely asexual reproduction, is the simplest and easiest method of reproduction for any organism, so it's no surprise that this is the main way microorganisms propagate. Just eat enough food for two people and split up. It's faster than sexual reproduction and can colonize a lot of space in a short time. Even when scaling up to the macroscopic scale, plants can still do this for much the same reasons as prokaryotes, and certain animals can alternate between sexual and asexual reproduction depending on environmental factors, either because they can't find a mate or as an evolutionary adaptation to changing seasons. The aphid is perhaps a notorious example of the latter, as [[What|newly-hatched females in the spring will quickly give birth to clones that are themselves pregnant]] (more or less), spreading all over your crops until fall arrives. Then their descendants start reproducing sexually so that their eggs, which can survive the winter while their parents freeze to death, hatch in the spring and continue the cycle.

Naturally, it didn't take long for us humans to start exploiting this. The most obvious use being plant cuttings to quickly grow crops from one parent plant, but bacteria that multiply rapidly also make for very good test subjects, seeing as it doesn't take long for issues to show up. It's when we tried doing this to multicellular animals that we started running into ethical problems. As it stands, cloning animals is ''not'' a perfect science, as it can take hundreds of tries for a cloned cell to start growing, and another hurdle making sure that cell develops normally. Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned, took nearly 440 attempts to work, and she died relatively young for her age (though claims that her clone status made her more vulnerable to illness were never proven, more research is needed to determine what happened there). Because of this cloning humans is, in most of the Western world, [[Extra Heresy|really super banned]]. To say nothing about the existential or religious issues that cloning brings up, the same way CRISPR gene-editing is in grey territory for human ethics. Though that hasn’t stopped some Chinese scientists from trying with Western scientists turning a blind eye until the media screams murder. Cloning ''organs'' on the other hand, is a ''bit'' less ethically dubious (though not without its detractors), and it could lead to a massive breakthrough in organ transplants if we ever perfect it (assuming 3D printing organs doesn't beat it to the punch).

One major weakness of cloning however is the lack of genetic diversity, and any genetic defects the parent might have is nigh-guaranteed (assuming said defect doesn't mutate into something else or go away entirely) to spread to their children[[Marathon|'s children's children]]. The decline of the Gros Michel banana cultivar is a perfect example of this: from its mass cultivation in 1835 it was ''the''  main variety of exported banana for over a century, but its massive vulnerability to [[wikipedia:Panama disease|a certain fungal infection]] led to it losing that status to the Cavendish cultivar in the 1960s. And from the looks of things, [[Grimdark|not even the Cavendish is immune to said fungus]]. Curiously, this one major hitch regarding cloning almost never shows up in fiction, typically because clones are typically treated as expendable and aren't expected to live long, or the writer(s) either didn't know about it or didn't care to address it. As an added snarl, some genes behave differently depending on whether they're inherited maternally or paternally, and since this "imprinting" isn't preserved by the cloning process a technically identical clone can still end up expressing entirely different traits from the original. Combine that with how environmental factors can further change the way how genes are expressed, and the prospect of any clone being entirely identical to its source is nearly zero: you'd need to not only replicate the genes and the imprinting, but also the entire life experience of the source organism right down to the smallest events.