Ged's guide to ... human cloning

I've never understood the general antipathy to human cloning. Your clone is just your twin, albeit one whose birth is separated from yours by an unusually long time. I guess there's an air of sci-fi about it, redolent with the promise of monsters and mutants, or maybe people are reacting to an unspoken feeling that the clone may be used as an organ supply for the original, that his or her person-hood may not be respected.

However that may be, I've finally worked out how we can do human cloning easily and cheaply, if not altogether ethically. Perhaps I might go a little further on that last point: the process involves ... steps ... that might be acceptable to the Chinese gerontocracy, or possibly if one were the dictator of North Korea, or one of the late, unlamented dictators in the Middle East, but are unlikely to go down well in even moderately democratic societies. Still, it's the idea that counts, and I'm fairly bursting with how clever this one is.

Note that this is not a technical how-to on getting a clone going. It still requires you to be able to produce a single human clone. What it does do is sidestep the problems currently resulting from that.

The current problem with cloning is that it is likely to produce clones with developmental abnormalities, as with the example of Dolly the sheep. However, if you can tolerate that then my method requires only two more things. First, that the abnormalities are limited to developmental ones, i.e. that they don't affect the germ line. Second, that the individual can at least reach the age of sexual maturity. [With those clues, you may now wish to guess for yourself how it works.]

Step 1. From a human male, acquire a cell suitable for whatever method of cloning you select. Remove that cell's Y chromosome.

Step 2. From the same male, acquire another such cell. Remove that cell's X chromosome and put it in the first cell.

Step 3. You now have a female version of the original male cell. [Well done! People will make very bad monster movies about you. Incidentally, now would be a good time to start choosing an island where you will spend the rest of your unnaturally long life hiding from the law.] Grow your first clone from this cell.

Step 4. Having raised your female clone to sexual maturity, breed her with the original donor. [Note, better start the whole process before the male is too old.]

Step 5. Profit! Time to buy that island and start raising a clone army / organ reservoir.


The elegance of this approach is that no matter what genetic recombination takes place as a result of sexual reproduction, the offspring will still be clones of the original, since both male and female sourced chromosomes have the same gene variants in the same places! Also, since all reproduction from now on is completely normal, developmental anomalies arising purely from the use of cloning technology should not occur. The only thing you have to worry about now is genetic drift arising from copy errors, and I would guess you have tens of generations before that becomes important.

Update
Tsk, not as clever as I thought. Because human gametes only contain one set of chromosomes, and because each chromosome is randomly selected from the maternal and paternal versions, it's not possible to guarantee that the offspring get the full complement of chromosomes from the original donor — for any given chromosome, an individual offspring might get two copies of the donor's paternal version for example, or two copies of the maternal version... The usual inbreeding rules will still apply, darnit!