Clone

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"'Cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down"

– Weird Al Yankovic, "I think I'm a Clone Now"

Strawberry plants regularly clone themselves, they send out runners which grow into new plants that can survive just fine even if the original plant dies

A Clone is an organism created from the same genetic information from another organism. The term comes from the Greek word for "twig", as you can clone a lot of plants by cutting off a branch or a leaf and planting it. This is done extensively in certain fields of agriculture, though it has it's problems relating to disease vulnerabilities (see the Irish Potato Famine or Gros Michel Bananas). Some animals also reproduce via cloning, with females making identical twins of themselves. The heaviest and largest organism on earth, the Pando, is a single male quaking aspen with a massive root network and multiple clone trunks.

But as a general rule, when people talk about cloning they talk more about human clones by artificial means, taking a gene sample, fertilizing an egg and growing it to maturity usually in some form of Exowomb.

Cloning in Real Life

Cloning, if we were to believe what current scientific researches are probably hinting to, is possible with humans. Not that we haven't tried that yet, we just don't have the ressources do it yet. Maybe. Nobody knows. What we can do now, however, is cloning animals. The first case of which was Dolly's, a sheep grown in a lab. Her birth was so mind-bogging that the entirety of the press was going all kinds of crazy about the implications of her birth. While she wasn't a perfect clone compared to the original sheep (as in, she had some complications), that didn't stop scientists from trying to do it yet again with other animals. Infamously, rich Chinese families tend to clone their dogs or buy clones of "perfected" puppies. If you look well enough, you can see videos of their owners just packing them up in caskets and throwing 'em around just to show-off how many they can get. Crazy how PETA has almost nothing to say on the matter, huh?

Human cloning, in most of the western world, is really super banned. Mostly because plenty of people see it as unethical. The same way CRISPR gene-editing is in grey territory for human ethics. Though that hasn’t stopped some Chiness scientists from trying with Western scientists turning a blind eye until the media screams murder.

Star Wars: Clone Troopers

Probably the most significant mention of clones for the Star Wars franchise is the existence of the Clone Army during the age of the Republic. Created by the Kaminoans using the genetic information of the bounty hunter Jango Fett, this Clone Army was the main battleforce that the Republic relied upon, as each soldier was able to become trained warriors within a mere decade. Each one was also conditioned to be less independent, which meant that there was no concern about betrayal by some outside force hijacking them...yeeaaaahhh, about that...

While the clones as an overall force was controlled by the Empire, they were eventually phased out and replaced by the Stormtroopers for multiple reasons, the most significant being the fact that Jango's death meant that they had lost access to his genetics in order to continue making clones (despite now having millions of people with the exact same genetics, the issue was that at some point you xerox a person so many times that defects started becoming more commonplace). Also concerning was the fact that clones tended to adhere strictly to protocol when not guided to think freely by a commanding officer, which made them question their tactical capabilities when compared to merely hypno-indoctrinating normal people. Furthermore, clones were expensive; they made great battlefield soldiers (for a fake war) but what the Empire needed was an enormous occupation force more than it needed elite soldiers, and there were enough desperate civilians to volunteer for the job.

Clones in 40K

Cloning tech was apparently around in the Dark Age of Technology, but has been largely lost to the modern Imperium. There are apparently some forms of cloning tech still around, but those who have them keep them intensely secret. The Death Korps of Krieg are widely rumored to use some form of cloning tech to mass-produce their suicidal martyr-soldiers. While the secrets of this tech were kept under strict wraps, it's only nominally approved by the simple fact that they're offering shittons of soldiers to feed the imperial war machine.

The Leagues of Votann are an entire society made up of clones and androids working together in harmony, something they know they had better damn well keep out of the knowledge of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Kin themselves were originally cloned from humans, but as time passed, the Votann AI gods that the kin revere eventually made a series of genetic changes in order to improve their efficiency and eventually transform them from being just humans into dwarves with a very faint warp signature.

Meanwhile, on Necromunda, at least a portion of House Escher’s members are asexually born via chemically induced parthenogenesis (similar to some IRL lizards, insects, and amphibians) if they don’t have fathers who are sickly males.

Clones in D&D

Magic can be used to create clones in Dungeons & Dragons, with the most famous example being the singular high level spell literally titled Clone.

Clones in Dune

Clones come in two flavors in the Dune Universe. One is regular clones created from the genetic material of another person. The other is specific category called a Ghola (from the Arabic word for ghoul) created from genetic samples from taken from donors after they died. Both are often created by noble houses as emotional crutches in place of their lost loved ones or as replacement commanders and advisors. What makes gholas unique is that they subconsciously have sense of deja Vu regarding their past donor’s lives in the form of senses, sounds, and smells that they can’t explain. the Tleilaxu who creates them with Axotl Tanks (of which their specifics are… grimdark to discuss) and copious amounts of psychoactive melange spice theorized that genetic memories of the gholas and clones can be reawaken if given the right stimulation. It worked with ghol. But involved massive psychological conditioning to prepare them for the extreme and psychological torture or sexual imprinting (often without consent) to awaken them. Needless to say, it worked with clones or gholas recalled their lives up to the point of their genes being sampled or upon their deaths (assuming they don’t go insane in the process). It was used as a way to reincarnate heros (willing or not) after the first Empire of the Known Universe was replaced with the Atreides Enpire.

Clones in Metamorphosis Alpha

Clones were introduced to Metamorphosis Alpha as an optional... race? Background? In issue #6 of Dragon Magazine - hey, this is an old game! Long story short, the Warden was outfitted with a protocol called "Clone Bank Alpha", where if a catastrophe seriously impacted the ship's available stockpile of a specific worker caste so that the generation ship couldn't handle replacing them in the standard way of "have kids and train them to take over", then this specialized bioengineering bay would churn out-rapidly grown clones artifically implanted with the knowledge they need to do their jobs, thus replacing the casualties quick and easy. Unfortunately, the Warden's designers never considered that the ship might be hit with a disaster so severe it not only caused the necessary casualties, but also knocked the damn clone bank offline... sure enough, guess what happened? And, of course, by the time the repair bots accidentally manage to fix things enough that they inadvertently turn it back on, the clone bank is as decayed as everything else on the ship, resulting in errors ranging from incomplete knowledge uploads to rampant genetic mutation. So the clones aren't that much better off than their techno-barbarian mutant descendants.