Society
author/Dall-E
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Longevity is a blistering hot area of R&D these days, attracting billions of investment dollars — and for good reason. Getting old isn’t any fun. More and more things start to wear out or break down until we eventually die. Finito.
For the last few decades, we’ve been deciphering the molecular mechanisms of aging.
The field is exploding. The research results are tantalizing, particularly if you’re a mouse. But practical therapies for you and me are still years away. Biology is complicated and the drug development process is slow, expensive, and poorly suited for outcomes that can only be evaluated near the end of life.
I’m optimistic that my kids or grandkids will benefit from this work, but nearing my sixth decade I may be dust before I can get a prescription for anything FDA-approved that slows or stops the aging process. Or, better, reverses it.
This is why I’m putting my life extension bets on being cloned.
author/Dall-E
I am fine with dying — although I do wonder what the end will be like for me. Will I have a stroke or heart attack? Choke on a piece of food? A car accident? Maybe get dementia and live in a fog for my last years?
In early 2020, I worried that Covid might take me out. During the lockdown, my wife and I put our affairs in order and set up a Trust for our kids. But I have an odd request on my bucket list: I’d like to be cloned after I die.
My interest in cloning is deep-rooted, sparked by reading Frank Herbert’s Dune when I was a kid.
The book is widely considered one of the great science fiction novels. It’s set on the desert planet of Arrakis and packed with tales of intrigue, warfare, politics, religion, and gigantic sandworms.
One character, Duncan Idaho, was particularly intriguing to me. He was a skilled warrior that dies in a fierce battle. But (and here’s a big spoiler) he returns in the second novel, Dune Messiah, as an adult clone (what Herbert called a ghola), tank-grown from cells recovered from his corpse by the biotechnologically savvy Tleilaxu.
Ghola Duncan is eventually able to access the original Duncan’s memories, effectively reincarnating the original. In Herbert’s novels, this process is repeated serially over thousands of years, giving Duncan near-immortality.
I was ten years old, but clonal resurrection seemed like a way better option than the standard burial or cremation. And almost fifty years later, it still does.
I started researching what needed to be done.
When Herbert wrote his saga, mammalian cloning was fiction. Dolly the sheep, cloned in 1996, made it science. Today, there are services that will clone your dog, cat, or farm animal. It’s an important tool in conservation and even de-extinction. But there’s still plenty of confusion about the process. The FDA even has a web page devoted to addressing common myths and misunderstandings.
Scientists have cloned a growing list of animals — but no people yet. Stanford professor Hank Greely believes that human cloning is overdue. So do I. What can happen usually does happen — and there’s no technical reason why a person cannot be cloned.
There are probably folks working on human cloning right now, only very quietly.
In one sense, human clones are actually pretty common. This is because about once every 250 pregnancies or so, the embryo spontaneously splits into two. The result is identical or monozygotic twins — or natural clones.
While identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins or unrelated individuals, no one would consider them the same person. Yet people tend to think that clones are photocopies. Blame Hollywood, I guess.
If I were cloned today, I would just get a twin brother in about nine months. He’d come into the world as we all do, a baby, not as an adult like Duncan Idaho. We’d have a large age gap, almost 60 years. He would definitely not have my memories or my soul — if you believe in that sort of thing.
There would be big differences. He wouldn’t have a biological father or mother — only a brother. He would develop in the womb of a gestational surrogate. He’d grow up in a completely different world than the one I did. He would have different experiences, teachers, and friends. Really, he’d just be a new addition to my family, one with 100% of my genetic program instead of the usual scrambled 50%.
He wouldn’t be Andrew 2.0. He’d be someone brand new. With people, nurture beats nature every time.
author/Dall-E
This is why most of the longevity supporters that I’ve met tend to be dismissive of cloning as a life-extension strategy.
Ideally, they hope to extend their life and their consciousness — not create a new one, even if it is very similar.
I get their thinking. But I’m a biologist. Like the Tleilaxu, I know that as long as a few of my cells remain viable, my death isn’t final. As an undergraduate, I learned about the 1951 passing of Henrietta Lacks from cancer. Mrs. Lacks wasn’t immortal, but her cancer cells were — and they live on to this day in countless laboratories worldwide. I’m also fond of the scene in The Fifth Element, where the “perfect being” Leeloo, like Duncan Idaho, is reconstructed from a handful of surviving cells.
The idea of rebooting my genome — giving my code a fresh start —appeals to me far more than trying to live as long as possible.
I’ve also maintained that consciousness isn’t as important as we like to think. I was unconscious for the first few years of my life while my brain was developing. And I go unconscious every time I drift off to sleep. The only reason that my life seems continuous to me is that I have memories (fuzzy ones, at least) of my yesterdays. Memory is vastly underappreciated.
Scientists are working to unravel the molecular basis of memory. Companies like Synchron and Neuralink are advancing brain-computer interfaces. One day, we may be able to directly record and transfer our memories from brain to brain. Combined with cloning, this would be about as close to true immortality as biology can take us. Until then, we have recordings — interviews, files, photos, videos, medical records, and the like. Not true memories but, compiled, information that could still be very useful to my clone and his caregivers — a detailed biography, perhaps even an instruction manual of sorts.
In fact, I think this compilation is the biggest reason to clone oneself: With the right preparation, your future twin would inherit many gifts from your life. Traits, obviously, but also records, experiences, understandings, possessions, money, and so forth. Taken together, clones would have a foundation to stand on and a glimpse into their future that we don’t.
author/Dall-E
I think the arrival of human cloning might play out like this. Sometime in the future — it could literally be tomorrow or decades from now — the news of a human clone will make headlines. Again. Because this has happened before, only they’ve all been ruled hoaxes. This time, however, the cloning will be scientifically verified.
There’ll be a lot of buzz for a while. Interviews and magazine covers, peer-reviewed scientific publications, and newspaper Op-Eds. But made in a lab or a bedroom, cloned or not, babies are just babies and kids are just kids. And our attention spans are short. I suspect public interest will drop off quickly, as it did for IVF babies in the 1970s. But some people will start asking fertility doctors if they can be cloned, too.
Cloning is bound to be legalized somewhere and eventually more widely when people realize that:
- It doesn’t involve any genetic engineering or gene editing
- The procedure looks almost identical to IVF and is just as safe
- There’s a niche but very lucrative demand for cloning
All this will take some time to play out, though, and I’m not getting any younger.
So to be cloned in the future, I have to prepare now. I’ve learned that this involves banking, banking, and more banking.
Cloning doesn’t require me to be alive, just a few of my cells. Even freeze-dried cells will probably do as long as the nuclei — the microscopic hard drives that hold our genomes — remain intact.
To have a shot at biological resurrection, I need to deposit some cells, dead or (preferably) alive, into a suitable biobank — basically a cryogenic safety deposit box for biological samples. Then it’s just a waiting game for human cloning to be perfected and legalized. Even if this takes a thousand years, I’m set.
I’ll also want to bank all the data I can. My parents only had a few photo albums documenting their lives together. Without even trying, I have terabytes of information about me and my family that I could pass to my clone.
But digital information comes with its own set of long-term storage issues.
It can disappear if companies go bankrupt. Access to cloud accounts can be denied. If kept offline, disk and tape formats change frequently (remember the Zip drive?). And digital media degrades over time —something known as bit rot.
One solution is to transcribe any digital information into DNA, converting electronic 0’s and 1’s into the nucleobases A, T, G, and C. DNA is so fundamental that there will always be technology to read it, and the molecule itself is really resilient. The best part is that the data stored in DNA can be banked alongside my cells. Then we’ll both be backed up for millennia.
author/Dall-E
There’s one other challenge in preparing for cloning — and it’s a big one.
I can bank my cells. I can leave instructions in my will for what I would like done with them. But who will execute my wishes?
What I need is an organization that can take on the responsibility of producing and then raising a child. To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this exists today.
Studying this problem, though, I’ve come to appreciate that there’s already a good template for just such a company: the family office. These are entities created specifically to assist a wealthy family or group of families with their particular needs, from money management to servicing the family jet. They’re well-suited to taking on a custodial or parental role. They’re meant to be the responsible adults in the room.
Family offices come in many flavors. Some families have dedicated offices while others share an office. And some family offices have gone fully digital — the virtual family office. I believe there’s room for a variant that specializes in biobanking and more, uh, hands-on family care.
Services offered by a family office (Wikipedia)
Of course, all this management and banking isn’t free.
A family office is pricey, even a virtual one. Biobanking fees range from $100/year for stem cells to over $1000/year for embryos, per sample. Cloud and DNA storage costs add up over time. Physical assets and records are even more expensive to store. And the cloning process itself, when it’s finally available, certainly won’t be cheap.
Human eggs are $5,000 or more each and it can take dozens to produce a pristine embryo. Add another $50,000 or so for fertility services and genetic testing. And then there’s the gestational surrogate, which can cost upwards of $150,000 in the US. Plus legal and other fees, and inflation. Add it all up and it’s over a quarter million dollars, maybe even a half million.
But raising the clone, like any child, is where it really gets expensive. The costs vary greatly depending on location and lifestyle and what support if any is provided by the government, but without the unpaid, round-the-clock labor and financial support normally provided by moms and dads, it will cost a fortune to professionally care for a child to adulthood.
So, in addition to banking my DNA and data, I will definitely have to bank money. Lots and lots of money.
author/Dall-E
Is my wanting to be cloned a crazy idea, then? Is it too early, too expensive, or just plain unethical to be cloned? Will it take resources away from my current family? Should I just accept that when I die, it’s game over?
It’s definitely early in that human cloning isn’t available or accepted yet, but not too early in that we’re on the technological cusp. It’s the forward edge of reproductive science, not sci-fi.
I don’t think it’s unethical to want to be cloned. It’s just not something most people understand or seek out yet. It’s unfamiliar, in the nebulous zone of “possible one day”. For me, though, it’s always felt quite natural, just something I’d get around to when the time was right. And I think that time is now.
Personally, I don’t think it’s unethical to actually be cloned. It’s an identical twin with a different birthday. There are no genetic edits or enhancements being done. The health risks to the baby should be minimal provided I’m not first in line. (There’s always a technical learning curve.) And my twin should actually have a lower risk of serious disease than average since he will have a life-proven genome and foresight into possible health issues.
As for a family office-type organization being the guardian and taking on parental responsibilities, I like to believe that it would be completely devoted to the health and welfare of the child. This is more than some biological parents can muster. And my twin would still be connected to the rest of my sprawling family. He wouldn’t be an orphan.
Ethically, what I’m troubled by is the practice of gestational surrogacy.
I understand that it’s a common and legal practice in many regions, but the idea of renting any part of a woman’s body doesn’t sit well with me. But perhaps other options will appear before cloning is available, like artificial wombs. Reproductive technologies are advancing so quickly.
Overall, so much about human cloning is scientifically unknown and intellectually unexplored, not to mention untested in the clinics and courts, that the only thing I know for certain about producing a clone is that it will be expensive. Millions of dollars. And I’m not rich.
Will cloning only be available to the wealthy?
I don’t think so. Here’s why. Banked, my cells, DNA, and data will be literally frozen in time. But any money that I put towards being cloned — funds that will be held in a Trust by the family office-type entity — should still be “living” and thus growing and compounding.
I’ve played with the numbers. Over a long enough time period — think 200 years or more — even a small starting deposit will swell into millions of dollars provided the operational overheads are low enough. It’s not the longevity escape velocity that longevity folks hope for, where technological advancements for living longer outpace years lived. It’s more an economic escape velocity — where generational wealth is produced in advance of the generation so that no child is born underprivileged.
Practically, this means that almost anyone can afford to be cloned provided they’re not in a rush. The minimum viable product is a cheek swab and a few hundred dollars put into the Trust fund, similar to an ancestry.com genealogy test, except this service would produce descendants. The bigger the initial deposit, the shorter the wait time. But the end result is the same.
The idea of producing generational wealth before children are born is a novel and powerful idea.
It’s unselfish, patient money. And it could be applied to any future life, not just a clone. It opens the door to a future where every child is born into abundance. This is a future I very much want to see.
author/Dall-E
Even if longevity R&D succeeds and we cure biological aging and related diseases, we still wouldn’t be immortal. There would be wars, murders, accidents, lightning strikes, and a thousand other ways to die, including starvation or suicide from boredom. Cloning would still have a place in this future, if only as a form of life insurance. And one day scientists may actually perfect memory transfer, giving each of us wisdom earned from multiple lifetimes.
Bottom line: I don’t think human cloning reduces any intrinsic valuation of human life. If anything, I think it increases it.
I believe it’s inevitable that human cloning will be added to fertility center menus. Meanwhile, most of the services I need to prepare for cloning — biobanking, wealth and legal management, and physical and digital storage — already exist. The only missing piece is the family office-type company that can act as a guardian or parent — so this is where I’ve been focusing my attention.
I really want to see this new family office created. It would specialize in the collection and storage of biological samples and digital data, the physical storage of any artifacts to be passed on, and long-term Trust management. Essentially, it would perform a “backup” of our life, plus offer more traditional family office services.
Big questions remain. Would this family office be allowed to directly take on the role of parent for my clone or any other child? There are precedents in that orphanages and kibbutzim have raised children, but laws vary from region to region. I’ve been told that in the US a real person, not a corporation, would have the ultimate authority over a child. But babies with no biological parents may require new regulations to be drafted.
More importantly, can an organization be a great parent? Companies, already immortal, can acquire knowledge for longer than a human lifetime. Factor in the rapid advances in machine learning and it’s not a stretch to imagine that, one day, a superintelligent AI becomes the foundation of the office and helps people take parenting to a completely new level.
We don’t have to wait for cloning to be legalized to explore this possible future. There are over 400,000 children in foster care in the US. And, closer to being cloned, there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned embryos stuck in cryogenic limbo at fertility centers.
If just a few of these children and embryos were put into the care of a family/family office, it could be a win-win situation. The children would get a better life and, in the case of embryos, a chance at life, period. Meanwhile, the office would start to generate institutional knowledge — a growing dataset of what works and what doesn’t.
Adopting kids, rescuing embryos, giving a new generation of kids knowledge and prosperity, and helping them all live long and happy lives. This is where exploring my own cloning has led me.
What should my next step be?
Thinking about this excites me. And scares me, too. These are big ideas, going to the core of what it means to be human. I’m a father. I know that taking care of kids is a massive responsibility. Do I really want to take on more? Meanwhile, in the US, reproductive rights have been backsliding. Where does rescuing frozen embryos fall in these new dynamics? Where does cloning?
Admittedly, I am in love with the idea of an organization becoming the bedrock of an ever-growing family. I’m starting to call it The Family, as the British Royals talk of The Firm. Parenting is all learning by doing, and some families struggle. Some kids have really horrible parents. Or no parents at all. I can see this organization helping not just people directly under its care but all parents and children, everywhere — a wise, always-available AI elder.
Given all the services that a family office offers, I’ve come to believe that every family would benefit from having access to one.
Human backups are easy. It’s daily life that’s hard.
I can only speculate as to what The Family might look like in five, ten, or twenty years — or in two hundred or two thousand. There are so many unknowns. How fast and how far will biotechnology advance? Will clones be accepted by society? Will they have identity crises? Will unmodified genomes be considered archaic? Will Family members feel disconnected from more traditional families, or will they integrate through bloodlines, friendships, and marriages? Should the Family operate its own homes, daycares, and schools or outsource them? Should the Family become a Family Business — a conglomerate of some kind? And, finally, just how big and diverse could the Family grow?
Really, there’s only one way to find out.
Andrew Hessel is the co-author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, which was released on February 15, 2022. He’s also the co-founder of Humane Genomics, a company that makes artificial viruses that target cancer, and the Genome Project-write, an international consortium focused on whole-genome engineering. He loves thinking about possible futures through the lens of biology.
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