Clone
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"'Cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down"
- – Weird Al Yankovic, "I think I'm a Clone Now"
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. The heaviest and largest organism on earth, the Pando, is a single male quaking aspen with a massive root network and multiple clone trunks. Some animals also reproduce via cloning, with females making identical twins of themselves.
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.
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 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, at worst Nurgle dealt her a bad hand). Because of this cloning humans is, in most of the Western world, 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 guaranteed to spread to their children'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 a certain fungal infection led to it losing that status to the Cavendish cultivar in the 1960s. And from the looks of things, 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.
Clones in Star Wars
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 Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett, this Clone Army was the main battleforce that the Republic relied upon, as vast batches of fully trained soldiers could be produced within a mere decade, and the Republic's constitutent planets had been at peace so long that they had no real standing armies to draft, not even a Planetary Defense Force. Each Clone Trooper 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 - as stupid as that sounds, the issue here was that at some point you xerox a person so many times that defects started becoming more commonplace, and this is an issue regarding real-life cloning as well. No Jango means no "pure" gene stock to replenish your supplies with, so you can either just keep cloning the clones and accepting the increasingly shit quality, or cut your losses and move on. 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 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, and cloning has since become the main way the kin even reproduce. It's worth noting that the kin actually worked out the "genetic diversity" issue as their "cloneskeins" have a shitton of templates to choose from, so they can tweak new kin as they're growing to nip any vulnerabilities in the bud. Select kin with psychic potential do exist, mainly because a fair chunk of a Votann's information is only accessible through psychic means. Special cloneskeins were developed to facilitate this need in a controlled manner (rather than letting them pop out "organically" as the Imperium oh so demonstrates).
Meanwhile, on Necromunda, at least a portion of House Escher’s members are asexually born via chemically induced parthenogenesis if they don’t have fathers who are sickly males (a result of Escher's work in drugs and pharmaceuticals). House Goliath is similarly dependent on cloning amneo-vats to create new members, seeing that a majority of their members are rendered sterile through the extensive genetic and chemical tampering that turns Goliaths of both genders into roid-raging lunatics (though "Natborn" members exist). Incidentally, both of them have House Van Saar to thank, considering their access to technology that might be beyond even the Mechanicus is the reason they even have cloning vats.
Of course, we can't mention cloning in 40k without discussing a certain sick fuck, the "Clone Lord" himself. Aside from extreme body modifications and drug fabrication, Fabius Bile made a name for himself through his work in cloning, most infamously cloning some late Primarchs:
- His first success was Ferrus Manus, in the hopes that Fulgrim could convince his bestest brother to switch sides after killing him during the Drop Site Massacre. Time and time again, the clones said no, and Fulgrim demanded Fabius clone Ferrus again after killing the clones over and over, believing that Bile was secretly sabotaging the cloning process every time (incidentally, this is where Fabius got his "surname" from as an enraged Fulgrim declared Fabius to be "full of bile" when Fabius honestly said there was nothing else he could do). At no point did Fulgrim ever consider that Ferrus would have never turned his back on the Imperium and, prideful being he (literally) was, someone else had to take the blame.
- His second success was none other than Horus himself, or at least a "good enough" clone of him as Big E vaporized his soul back on the Vengeful Spirit (amusingly, the Ferrus clones were also imperfect, since his trademark metal-covered arms weren't "natural" and Fabius couldn't replicate that). A certain armless failure caught wind of this, and besieged the Emperor's Children-held stronghold of Harmony both to kill the clone and to assert his de facto leadership over the Traitor Legions. Suffice to say, this did little to endear Bill with the surviving members of his Legion (as Harmony happened after Kharn royally buttfucked both the Emperor's Children and the World Eaters at Skalathrax), on top of being disowned by Fulgrim for his "failure" with Ferrus and now being on the newly-minted Despoiler's shitlist. Bile was effectively declared persona non grata and struck out on his own. Not that he minded, as he was more interested in his research and he's still the best biologist the Traitor Legions have, so they begrudgingly let him live in exchange for his latest batch of (non-Primarch) clones for new recruits and whatever drugs he and his cronies have cooked up, presumably paying Bile with whatever slaves and/or cultists the Legions consider expendable for Fabius to work his magic on.
Of course, Fabius keeps the best stuff for himself, and his cloning processes are no exception. He's made clones of himself both to improve manpower (as few people would want to associate with him lest they become his newest test subjects) and to stave off death from the Blight that once plagued his Legion (hopping bodies every time his current body started to fail). Indeed, his obsession with medical horrors stems from trying to find a cure from said Blight, which was only rectified when the Legion reunited with Fulgrim, so any marines from the old tainted batches were discarded instead. Being the Chief Apothecary at the time put Fabius in a position to falsify his medical records, and start utilizing less ethical means of keeping the Blight at bay. His path to damnation was indeed paved with good intentions, and while he did find a way to escape the Blight's clutches through his work in cloning, a proper cure was ultimately never found.
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 a 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 but involved massive psychological conditioning to prepare them for the extreme and psychological torture, forced existential paradoxes, 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.