Not necessarily, if you can perfect biological scaffolding technology.
I can envision an unethical young billionaire, say in his 20s, who’s forward-thinking enough to anticipate that, at some time in the next few decades, some organ or other of his might fail, and producing a clone every few years so he always has some young “donor” to “harvest” when the need comes.
He’d probably get caught, of course, but I can still envision someone trying it.
This. As far as the technical aspects, my guess is that humans would not be particularly problematic compared to other species. Not the easiest, but probably far from being the most difficult. Legal and ethical aspects are a different story.
In the link I posted, somebody did go as far as to clone human embryos but they were never implanted. They basically did everything you’d need to produce a human clone except put the embryos in a womb.
It’s not technically problematic at all. But there are several nations that have made it illegal to produce a human clone. And even where it isn’t outright illegal, the ethical aspects are definitely thorny.
Cloning embryos is much different than cloning adult cells. AFAIK, cloning adult cells requires either somehow getting them to act like embryos, or extracting the DNA and put it into an embryo.
Possibly, but looking at how advertising his ethically quesiontable genomic manipulation worked out for He Jiankui, I’m not sure that others might not prefer to keep it under wraps.
He was immediately detained on SUSTech’s campus and kept under surveillance. On 30 December 2019, Chinese authorities announced that he was found guilty of forging documents and unethical conduct; he was sentenced to three years in prison with a three-million-yuan fine (US$430,000)
It seems like the cost of producing and maintaining the clone might be more expensive than supporting research on artificial organs - but Billy Billionaire might not realize that until too late
I think that was the scientist I was talking about 
But I might have been thinking of someone else who didn’t do gene editing.
I expect such a scientist would still advertise after the fact, despite the consequences. It’s already illegal (or close to it) but they’ve got an ego to satisfy. We live in a society where criminals will advertise what they did on Instagram, typically without giving away their real name, and it wouldn’t surprise me if scientists tried to do this sort of thing before social media.
I saw a documentary on this subject. It was called “Parts: The Clonus Horror”.
Yes, a different academic group has done this.
I can think of one way that humans might be more difficult than other animals. The first cloned mammals had drastically reduced lifespans. I imagine that progress has been made on that front, but I don’t know how much. But suppose that they made improvements to the point that those problems don’t show up for ten years, or twenty: On most mammals, that’d be good enough, because most mammals only have a lifespan about that long, anyway. But a human who only lived for ten or twenty years could hardly be called a “success”.
YOU GUYS! It may have already happened! Back in 2008, somebody was blasting out emails to people in the news media, claiming that Scarlett Johansson was a clone. I don’t know if anybody asked Scarlett about it—but if she was a clone, how would she know? Those clones in Orphan Black had no idea!
I had forgotten about this until last summer, when a Scarlett lookalike turned up on TikTok:
Huh. 
Probably not an issue. Dolly the sheep lasted 7 years, which is slightly short for a sheep, but clones of Dolly aged normally.
I could imagine a star athlete wanting a child who also has the potential to be a star athlete. Lots of parents want their child to be athletically successful. If a parent already has the genetics to pull that off, might as well have use cloning to ensure they have a child that they know can physically compete at that level.
I heard about successful polo horses being cloned:
It seems like human cloning could be used for something similar.
They need to clone Adolfo 6 times to ride his 6 cloned horses. That would be a fun polo match.
Cloning human beings is fraught with too many ethical dilemmas.
…but not if we genetically engineer out all their higher cortical brain functions involved with emotions, reasoning, etc. With all of their humanness bred out, we’d only have to grant them the same basic rights as, say, a lizard. Then we set them out into the workforce, doing the jobs they do best: bomb defusers, lawyers, football players, attorneys, sex workers, members of the bar, politicians, counselors-at-law, social media influences, legal advisors…
Did I mention lawyers?
Sure, that’s often a reliable source of research funds. All that’s needed for this to have happened is:
- This obscenely rich parent with serious mental issues after losing a child.
- Deciding to pursue cloning, and doing so in absolute secrecy.
- Contacting only people who’ve kept their mouths shut since.
- Still managing to reach someone who can competently clone mature cells.
- No one learning about it. Not even in the form of anonymous op-eds in the Washington Post.
Maybe I’m just naively pessimistic about the success rate of super secret, unethical, private sector research projects …
Back in the late 70s, I read in OMNI a rumor that the unnamed man who was cloned in this book was Alex Comfort, the author of The Joy of Sex.
There is a certain irony there.
Well, OTOH:
I don’t know if there are any human clones out there, but I find it laughable that ethics and legality are any kind of obstacle to a fairly large percentage of the people (and governments) out there with the resources to create one.