Increased Lifespan Through Cloning?

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Recently, I saw news about a new company that provides commercial pet cloning for people willing to pay the $200,000+ price tag. What interested me however was that in a video the company shot, they claimed they could transfer all of your dead pets memories, tendencies, and personality traits to the newly cloned pets brain. Basically everything that was "them." So what if this could be applied to human cloning if it was ever legalized? Could it actually keep someone "alive" longer then the typical lifespan would allow? Of course a death involving the brain being destroyed could keep you from cheating death, but the company also claims it can store digital copies of a pets brain if such an unforseen death occured... But then there's the question of whether or not your clone would actually be you, or just someone exactly like you with all of your memories. But then Would it be possible to create a clone and transfer over the original brain and spinal column? Of course you would have to be carful not to destroy either for the rest of your life, (else you'd have to risk doing the digital copy transfer) or at least until your brain and/or spinal column refuse to continue creating new cells, and began to decay. But perhaps the latter could be evaded with some sort of cell stimulating technology... I don't know. However, there might be an ethical problem with using a cloned body to transplant a brain/spinal column into. Much like in "The Island," if the clones were created with a conciousness it's doubtful there would be much approval towards killing them for this kind of use.

Anyways, this is just something I've been thinking about alot lately, so I wanted to get some opinions. I know it's very possible that the news and video I saw about this "company" (can't remember the name) is fake. But still, it sounds theoretically possible to me...

Thats very interesting. Already thought of, but still very interesting. I think its totally possible to do this. As for making a copy of yourself, I dont believe it would be you. Just a copy of the original.
Heck, instead of cloning your body then transfering your brain and spine to the new body, why not just reconstruct your already existing body with nanobots? You could do this periodically to cut down the aging, or have the nanobots programmed to eliminate age-causing stuff. I can foresee a lot of complications, but we can get those bugs out eventually. Would this be in the bionanotechnology field, by the way? The community college near me offers classes in that field.

I suppose its also possible to clone yourself, then using the "designer babies" technology, alter a bunch of genes to either enhance or asthetically change yourself. For legal reasons, I dont think they will ever allow people to construct new bodies. The reason being, I believe, is it would create all sorts of identity problems. Your finger prints would be different for one. It would be like the ultimate disguise to have your finger prints changed, let alone your entire body. Even your DNA signature would be different. There would also be no way to trace back your ancestry, because technically you dont have any. Your body was created in a lab by scientists. Sure, your memories and brain might say you do, but your body tells another story.

Copying errors will inevitably creep in. In the long run, entropy wins.

ruveyn

Eh, I'm of the mind that even a perfect copy isn't you. Not really. But, of course, that opens directly into a "what is a soul?" discussion.

From a purely fact based pov, it may eventually be possible to sustain life, even considerably past our current life span. But, no one is going to be immortal. Accidents happen, either in the treatments to sustain life, or some unforseeable event in general. As-is, people die from numerous other sources besides age or failing organs. Accident, murder, suicide, war, disease, famine, etc.

Yes, it seems pretty likely that backing up your brain and putting it into a clone will never make that clone "you." After all, it would be perfectly possible to put that backup into the clone before you die, so that way you can know it isn't you. You'd just be creating another person exactly like you, and freaking them out when they learned that none of their memories are actually theirs. I guess using cloned body parts and nano technology would be the only chance for extending ones lifespan until their brain and spine began to decay, unless someone could come up with a work-around to the aging process in those parts of the body...

Not that cloning someone and giving them their counter parts minds couldn't be helpful though. If they were an important thinker of the time, (e.g. Einstein) they could be kept alive (at their will, of course) to be of further help to society.

Oh, and I just remembered but I think they did a whole episode on something EXACTLY like this on The Venture Brothers where Dr. Venture had an entire room dedicated to raising Hank and Dean clones and storing copies of their minds.

I've always wondered this to actually... Is it a physical part of the brain that dies with it's owner? Or does it simply become "disembodied" when the host dies, aimlessy hovering around in some unseen dimension without a conciousness waiting for the chance to be within proximity to bind itself to another healthy brain that has yet to be claimed? I'm hoping it's the last one... If that were true, I guess it would be theoretically possible to bind your own soul to a cloned body if the original being's soul is close enough to the clone at the moment it could start sustaining a soul of it's own... But I guess there's no way to know if that's even possible unless there was a way to actually see a soul binding with a body.

Somatic cells found in humans die after about 50 replications give or take. That is why humans do not live forever. The only cells that can replicate indefinitely are cancer cells and they cause death eventually.

The question "what is a soul" is a nonsense question. Is a soul a physical entity or process? If not, asking what it is, is a waste of time.

ruveyn

BS. Such is the stuff of science fiction, at least for now. I would be surprised if it were possible anytime this century, and would not be shocked if it was never feasible.


Then they are lying.

well i thnik it will happen but not in the near future. you can read charles stross glasshouse. the best sf that i read in years.

i work in nanotechnology and am really frustrated how far away we are still from mother nature. even the advances in biology are made with the tools from nature i.e. just isolated molecules that one puts to his own goals.

People seem to forget that a clone is the same age as the 'parent'. Dolly the sheep died after only a few years of life because she was already an old sheep when they cloned her. So if you cloned your 10 year old kitty and he died a year later chances are the clone would only last a year too.

This is not correct. Various stem cells (e.g. germline stem cells) will self-renew indefinitely. It's these stem cells that ensure a continuous supply of sperm throughout a man's lifetime, for example.

i think he referred to somatic cells not stem or reproductive cells.

if i remember correctly the problem with aging is related to telomeres (???) repetitive noncoding sequences at the end of dna. i mean then one can theoretically add these sequences to a clone the same why how they alter genes i presume.

it seems there are no bio-experts around here..

This is slightly insulting, as I'll be getting a PhD in genetics this upcoming spring.

yeah..I want to see the experts on doggie mind-to-mind transfer. Amazing...we wouldn't have to retrain the clone on the old tricks...

I think selective cloning (organs, etc) might be possible for the 'you' that's here now, but once you create a new body, the mind doesn't ever learn and develop in the same way.

The somatic cells (as opposed to germ cells) have a limited number of replications they can do. The only somatic cells that can reproduce endlessly are cancer cells and they will eventually kill the organism.

ruveyn

That is true that somatic cells do not undergo mitosis indefinitely, but they do not necessarily die once they are no longer mitotically cycling. It would be more accurate to say that the cells simply go into a mitotically quiescent state, but those cells can very well still be biologically functional. The "50 cell divisions" of a somatic cell, is that from in vitro studies?

At any rate, I already have a genetic clone of myself. mwahahhaahhaha!