No, You Can’t Clone an Army (But Could you Clone a Person?)
A Russian defense minister suggested using 3,000 year old DNA to clone Scythian warriors. Here’s why that can’t happen — and a look at what’s really possible .
In April, Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu, Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, attended an online session with the Geographical Society. They were showcasing the unearthed, ancient remains of Scythian soldiers found in the Tuva region of Siberia. History (and folklore) speak to the prowess of this warrior tribe, and though buried for three-thousand years in permafrost, their bodies have been remarkably well-preserved. Shoigu, who is also General of the Russian Army, asked just how well the tissue had stood the test of time. After all, if science could clone Dolly the sheep, he suggested perhaps “we could make something of it,” and try resurrecting long-deceased Siberians.
That’s a long way from cloning an army of Russian soldiers, despite the recent headlines that have suggested as much. But such news comes on the heels of comic-to-screen film The Old Guard, about an elite group of mercenary-style soldiers led by an immortal Scythian — and the May 4th release of Disney’s The Bad Batch, follow up to Clone Wars. Given the nexus of science fiction and science fact (after all, both a horse and a ferret were cloned this year), it isn’t hard to imagine catastrophic possibilities if such a technology were possible. But — is it?
No. Well. Not exactly.
If I take a piece of myself, and from that DNA construct a new, genetically identical match, it will nonetheless develop differently, have different experiences, be — in essence — no more myself than a twin sibling would be. Our DNA carries a lot of things with it. It doesn’t come with weapons systems.
If scientists were to isolate viable DNA tissue from ancient warrior remains for purposes of cloning, what they’d end up with is a lot of small, crying, hungry creatures in need of constant attention and care. That is, your average human babies. You can’t clone “an army.” You could, possibly, have a go at cloning ancient people groups.
Replicants of a sort have a surprisingly long history. Lab cloning has been with us since the first artificially split salamander egg, divided in 1902; it has been considered among geneticists from the 1920s to the 1960s, and cloning large mammals has been within our power since Dolly took her firsts steps.
Even James D. Watson (of double-helix fame) wrote about clones — in 1971. He argued that “test tube” technology for fertility would be “ripe for extensive efforts, legal or illegal, at human cloning.” In a fine example of scientific understatement, he also claimed that “the growing up to adulthood of these first clonal humans could be a very startling event.” Quite.
So what *is* a clone? And can we really make it work? It’s already ongoing in animals, a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Any cell in the body, even skin, may be used so long as it has full genetic code of a person (for that, we can thank geneticists like Watson for sorting out DNA and, ultimately, mapping the human genome). The nucleus of such a cell is removed and transferred into a hollowed out egg cell, where a slight pulse of electrical energy can cause the cells to divide and develop.
That is how Revive and Restore cloned the endangered Przewalski’s horse, and how zoos around the world are hoping to biobank animal tissues for future clone birth possibilities. Dolly the sheep had a 1 in 277 chance. New technologies have drastically reduced those odds. From concept to gestation and birth, the cloning of “Kurt” the Przewalski’s foal took just a single year.
Right. So what about people? Here is where it gets tricky. Even Ian Wilmut, the scientist behind cloning Dolly, thought human cloning might be possible — but also that it was criminally unethical. It wasn’t worth the risk, he explained… though he outlined potential uses for “pluripotent” cells which can become almost any cell in the body except the placenta (and so could never become a baby). If the line here seems fine, that’s because it is.
Cloning for sheep and horse and ferret relies on reproductive cloning. You build an embryo, and you implant it in the womb of the respective animal mother. For humans, however, we use only therapeutic cloning — or, as it is more often called, stem cell research.
“They were such tiny dots” wrote Jose Cibelli, Robert Lanza, and Michael West in 2001. They had managed to clone clusters of 100-cell blastocysts — the starter stock for growing replacement nerve, muscle and other tissues. These, they claimed, were the first cloned human embryos. They were not, however, implantable. The team never wanted them to be put into wombs or brought to term. That doesn’t mean no one else has had that idea, however.
In 2001, Cyprus-born physiologist Panayiotis Michael Zavos testified before Congress that five different infertility clinics were racing to be first to clone babies. His lab would be one of them, even if he had to move out of country to do it (human reproductive cloning was banned in the United States). Zavos admitted to implanting five blastocysts into women as early as 2002. “The cloned child is coming,” he claimed. Is the cloned child already here?
No. Well. Not exactly.
On September 27th, 2016, the New Scientist broke a shocking exclusive: “World’s first baby born with new ‘3 parent’ technique.” The controversial process allowed parents with genetic mutations to have “healthy babies” using nuclear transfer. Developed by John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City, three parent babies develop in a few different ways . The most common (first approved in the UK): a prospective mother’s egg and a donor egg are both fertilized with the prospective father’s sperm. Then each nucleus is removed. The nucleus from the donor’s fertilized egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother’s fertilized egg. In Zhang’s case, however, something new was applied: spindle nuclear transfer.
The parents did not want any fertilized tissue destroyed. Zhang complied by removing the nucleus from the mother’s egg and placing it into the unfertilized hollow egg of a donor. Only then was it fertilized. The problem with this technique (among several) is this: it’s not legal. Not in New York, or anywhere in the US. The procedure took place in Mexico and was declared a great success. So is that baby a clone? Absolutely not. He’s a three-parent baby, with three individuals involved in his creation, and like all babies (including any cloned Scythians), he cries, he nurses, he needs. But the science and techniques for his birth developed out of experiments with cloning animals and those “tiny dots” of human embryonic stem cells.
Where does that leave the Russian story? About where it began: an anecdotal comment, a wish for future maybes and nothing more. There will never be a time when entire clone armies, full grown and ready for battle, can be lab generated . But there may come a time when cloned humans are viable. As always, however, the question is much less about scientific can , and much more about the ethical should.
