I’m trying to remember the first time I ever heard about clones. It had to be as a kid. Maybe in a monster movie or TV show? Possibly a clone was referred to by the more general term “double”, which is not necessarily a clone. Whatever it was, I’m sure as a kid that I knew it wasn’t real.
These days human cloning is a more frequent parts of television and movies. For instance, Orphan Black is a long-running TV show with clones as main characters.
Animal clones
These days, animal clones are beyond TV and movies. They are quite real and becoming more common. People can clone their pets including dogs. Researchers can clone livestock. I hadn’t realized though that horses could be routinely cloned until I saw this new article: Game of clones: Science is immortalizing Argentina’s top polo horses, WaPo. I do recall someone mentioning to me that if someone could clone prize-winning racehorses that there would be big money there.
Apparently in some areas of polo, cloned horses are very common. Could this happen with horse racing too? At the moment it appears that thoroughbred racing bans cloned horses.
More recommended reads
- Preclinical and dose-ranging assessment of hESC-derived dopaminergic progenitors for a clinical trial on Parkinson’s disease, Cell Stem Cell.
- Highly cooperative chimeric super-SOX induces naive pluripotency across species, Cell Stem Cell.
- Transcriptional and epigenetic dysregulation impairs generation of proliferative neural stem and progenitor cells during brain aging, Nature Aging.
- A ‘living skin’ is protecting the Great Wall of China, scientists say, CNN.
- Moonwalk steps out with $57m for epigenetic reprogramming platform, Longevity Technology. This one reminds me of Altos Labs in some ways.
- A time- and single-cell-resolved model of murine bone marrow hematopoiesis, Cell Stem Cell.