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People already find inventive ways to off each other in life and in fiction. The addition of aliens, rocket packs, and transporters only offers them more variety. See the ten most evil murder plots ever to come to fruition. More »
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Using a technique that produced a mouse from tissue frozen for 16 years, a scientist at Kyoto University plans to clone a mammoth within the next four to five years. More »
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Do you enjoy space opera, fantastic technologies, millennia-old mysteries, and terrifically wicked villains who want their offspring to embrace their dark side? Do you like women too? Then you'll love 1981's Hugo winner, The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge. More »
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Popular culture has been misrepresenting clones since the term was applied to Homo sapiens. If you want to make the most of the biotech revolution, you're going to have to unlearn the most egregious of culture's misapprehensions. More »
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Some of today's biggest legal debates (genetic discrimination, patents for human genes) might have seemed far-fetched not so long ago. So the American Civil Liberties Union is looking to science fiction to figure out tomorrow's biggest challenges to personal liberty. More »
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The musical, measured Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm — which won the Hugo in 1977 — is an artful admixture of clones and poetry, with a message that'll never get old. More »
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One of the great mysteries of plant biology is a seemingly immortal tree called the Trembling Aspen (Populus tremuloides), which reproduces by growing clones from its root system. A new study suggests that the trees live for 20,000 years. More »
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The next trailer for Star Wars: Clone Wars came out at Comic Con, and they're really turning everything a shade darker in the new season. Bounty hunters torturing chained up victims, war, jealousy... and Obi-Wan's old flame is ignited. More »
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The Korean Customs Service just got six new employees: a set of Labrador Retrievers cloned from a top drug-sniffing dog. Soon, they'll be rooting out heroin smugglers, and getting a good whiff of your dirty laundry. More »
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Diminutive British actress Keira Knightley is starring in the cloning drama Never Let Me Go, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed novel. So thinkThe Island, but probably with fewer people exploding and more actual character development. More »
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The new Cinemax series Forbidden Science started last Friday, delivering a sexy, low-budget tale of renegade clones, memory downloads, and android property rights. Also, did we mention the sexy part? More »
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Now that cloned animals are having babies, as well as spawning second and third generation clones, there's no telling when the cloning madness will stop. More »
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Movies about cloning usually deal with some kind of identity crisis — it's inherent in the subgenre — but few of them are as weird, or potentially as profound, as The Clone Returns To The Homeland, a new Japanese film that's already being compared to Tarkovsky's Solaris. The story of an astronaut who dies and is replaced by a clone with faulty memories could soon be showing up at your local arthouse, or DVD rental store. Click through for a plot synopsis and the trailer (in Japanese only, sadly.) More »
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Anti-cloning advocates may want to keep their pitchforks at the ready. A United Nations bioethics committee is taking a second look at the UN’s current cloning policy, which condemns all possible forms of human cloning. Could the UN be on track to relax its views on cloning, or is it looking to ban the practice for good? More »
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When the "bad boy of French literature" made a movie of his ground-breaking novel about cloning, cults and the end of the world, he probably wasn't hoping for comparisons to Benny Hill or critics bursting out laughing during his first showing. Novelist and H.P. Lovecraft critic Michel Houellebecq was so offended by the critics' laughter, he canceled a press conference on his movie Possibility Of An Island. But what was so bad about Possibility anyway? More »
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Columbia Pictures has bought the rights to R.L. Stine's teen book series Goosebumps. But if they want the movie to be a huge success with the free-spending twenty-somethings who grew up on the series, Columbia and producer Neal Moritz (I Am Legend, Prom Night) should focus on the books' more science fictional story-lines instead of the spooky house and ghosts-in-the-attic ones. A list of the more scifi friendly Goosebumps (with book spoilers) after the jump. More »
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It's inevitable: the media has not only confused human reproductive cloning with "designer babies," but in fact they have confused a stem cell experiment with designer babies too. I love my sensationalist science as much as the next person, but the London Times has gone batshit with its reports that a GM human embryo could lead to "designer babies" out there in the wilds of science land. Now all these anti-baby engineering groups are going nuts because nobody has bothered to explain the science to them. Even Wired picked up the story, though thankfully without the "designer baby" crap. So what's the deal? When will you get your designer baby with wings and mutant powers? More »
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It's hard to find dogs that have just the right set of attributes to sniff for drugs, which is why South Korean Customs officials got their favorite drug-sniffing dog cloned. The seven clones (four are pictured here) have all grown up to be excellent sniffers — though only one in ten dogs usually passes drug-sniff training, all seven passed. All seven dogs are called Toppy, and each cost over $100,000 to clone, plus $40,000 extra to train. Over at Technovelgy, Bill Christensen points out that the cloned drug-sniffers have a precedent in a science fiction whose representation of cloning was so inaccurate that you'll be surprised it got anything right. More »
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It's a popular defensive strategy at the bottom of the ocean: If you're scared, just clone yourself. The process will make you smaller and harder to find, as well as doubling the chance that your genes will survive. Sand dollar larvae are rampant self-cloners, but they only do it when they sense danger. That means there's a kind of conscious intent behind their cloning — it's not just an ordinary part of their reproductive cycle. How easy would it be to port this trait to humans, so we could just pop out a new self when the old one is about to be offed? More »
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More details are emerging about Fringe, J.J. Abrams new Fox show. The more we hear about it, the more Fringe sounds like a slightly tweaked X-Files clone. One piece of news: John Noble (Denethor from Lord of the Rings) will star. Click through for a new plot summary. More »
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The 2001 movie Repli-Kate is so many things: a ripoff of Weird Science, a comedy of cloning, and the only movie I've ever seen where Eugene Levy yells "PENIS PENIS PENIS" really loudly, over and over, for reasons I can't even remember. Here's a great scene where one of the gene geeks uses his amazing high-throughput sequencer to create a clone of a hot chick from some blood drops on a CD-ROM. Even the genechip whiz kid Michael Eisen, whom I know for a fact has watched this movie, agrees that this is the most thrilling representation of genetic engineering ever captured on film. More »
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Yesterday, the chief executive at biotech company Stemagen became the first adult human to see his clone mature into a viable embryo. No, Samuel Wood isn't planning to raise his own baby clone — he's just doing research into a new way of creating stem cells from adult DNA. But scientists pointed out that the embryo he created was viable enough to be implanted in a woman's uterus, IVF-style. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't mature into a human baby. More »
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Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), creator of Astro Boy and over 700 manga series, is often called the God of Comics or the Disney of the East. But neither title acknowledges the mark he's left on science fiction. If you don't know who he is, then you should get to know him — now. For decades, Tezuka's works weren't accessible to the non-Japanese-reading public. NBC aired over half of the Astro Boy anime series in the sixties, but the original manga wasn't published in English until 2002. At last, a handful of publishers is actively translating and releasing some of Tezuka's lesser known titles into English. One of the best is Apollo's Song, published in English for the first time a few months ago by Vertical Inc. Its an elegant, compact representation of Tezuka's scifi genius — and a milestone in Japanese free expression due to its frank depiction of sexuality in a postapocalyptic world. More »
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The FDA is on the verge of approving cloned cows as safe for eating. That means you could be eating cloned cow's milk and thick beef clonesteaks by next Friday. Yum! According to a rather sober assessment in the Wall Street Journal, however, it's not likely that Black Angus will start having clone cuts on their menus. It's so expensive to clone cows that the consumer market will see few of them. Instead, companies are planning to use them as breeding stock. The whole thing makes me think of Margaret Atwood's chickie knobs in Oryx and Crake. More »
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Last weeks's mid-season finale of Smallville just helped underscore everything that's been going wrong with the show over the slow trainwreck of the last few seasons. Smallville won't be dying a painful death due to the writer's strike, because there are six more episodes completed and ready to air, but last week's finale does make us wonder if the show should go on. Here's why. More »
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Neasden Control Centre, a London artist project that quickly became a cult favorite after doing funky commercial prints for hot shot clients like MTV and Esquire in the early 2000s, has a cool new book out. It's called Lost Control, and it features 192 pages of full-color art, mostly original, 99% hand-drawn, depicting a range of neat-o concepts like diagrammed astronauts and a woodblock print-like greyhound running through bubble-letters. The picture above is my favorite. It's a summit of clones. More »
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Now that human clones are everywhere, how should we treat them? It's not just Clonaid asking anymore. The United Nations has just released a policy report saying that if we cannot reach global consensus on banning human cloning, we'll have to cope with a world full of human clones. And you know what that means. We could be facing a massive Clone Lib movement! So what does the most powerful body of international wonkitude recommend we do about the coming clone peril? More »
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While all the attention given to human cloning has focused almost solely on questions of morality and bioethics - or on religion and the nature of government power - little energy has gone into questioning the literary impact a human clone might someday have. More »
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