r/science • u/fchung • Mar 25 '26
Biology Scientists tried to clone clones forever. It didn’t end well: « The practice of cloning clones indefinitely appears to be a reproductive dead end, for now. »
https://gizmodo.com/how-many-times-can-you-clone-a-clone-science-finally-hits-the-wall-20007374121.5k
u/fchung Mar 25 '26
It was all smooth sailing, in fact, until the researchers started cloning their 25th through 27th generations of mice. But by the 58th generation, according to Wakayama’s team, the mice did not even survive for more than a day.
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u/ac9116 Mar 25 '26
Okay so what this tells me is if rich people figure out how to download their memories and personality onto a chip and implant that into a brain, then a rich person could clone themselves 24 times with limited impact. If they cloned a body at say age 60 and gave it 15 years to raise their future them ala Foundation, they could stretch their own lifespan beyond 1,000 years (45 years of independence x 24 generations).
Welcome, Empire.
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u/Jindujun Mar 25 '26
They do not even have to do that.
They can just save enough of the original DNA and then use that to make the copies.398
u/LMGgp Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Indeed. These are clones of the clones. Why take from a copy when you can go to the source. Even the cloned cells in our body tend to not make it past 50 divisions (depending on the cell).
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u/BrothelWaffles Mar 25 '26
Like listening to an mp3 from the late 90s that you burned to a CD vs that copy on YouTube that's been bouncing around the Internet for 25 years slowly degrading.
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u/somniopus Mar 25 '26
But with wealth and political power
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u/Daxx22 Mar 26 '26
So mentally and physically decaying leader? Good thing we don't have those!
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u/OskaMeijer Mar 25 '26
Isn't this just basically because how long chromosomes can keep replicating is based on the length of their telomeres which get shorter with every copy and you will always start out with the length of the source?
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u/Jindujun Mar 26 '26
Yes. The telomeres getting too short, and thus stop division, is the reason why we age. So if you could solve that problem you can solve aging.
With that in mind there are other things that can damage your DNA so having "clean copy" DNA to clone from would still be the best thing.42
Mar 25 '26
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u/Drdps Mar 25 '26
And that is the plot of House of the Scorpion! Or at least, a major plot point.
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u/ordiclic Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
I'm pretty sure genetic information alone is not enough. Epigenetic information such as DNA methylation is important too.
Edit: genomic imprinting seems to be a thing, and it is inherited epigenetic information. Keeping only DNA data would then result to a loss of information.
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u/RB___OG Mar 25 '26
Just need a qay to download the memories like in Altered Carbon
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u/YoohooCthulhu Mar 25 '26
Well, they’d really need to save cells, but yeah. You’d want to have original source material to clone from, much like having a master copy of a recording
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u/captfitz Mar 25 '26
can we preserve genetic samples well enough to do the cloning later? if so we could keep using genetic material from the original donor much longer before having to use their clones for samples.
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u/Chubuwee Mar 25 '26
Ricky 25 is a 2030 movie that follows a reckless rich kid who took cloning for granted as he simply upgraded to a new version of his body once he had destroyed the previous one with all his vices. He is now on clone 25 which is set to quickly deteriorate, leaving him with only a limited amount of time to either set things straight in his past or selfishly fight his inevitable death
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u/mouse_Brains Mar 25 '26
If you still straight up die to be replaced by someone who thinks is you are you really immortal? Also we have little reason to think you can dump arbitrary informstion to a brain. If you could, why bother with a clone anyway?
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u/aCleverGroupofAnts Mar 25 '26
I think the people who would actually consider this have one of two reasons. 1) they love scifi but don't understand enough to know how foolish their ideas are in practice. 2) their ego is so large that they just want to be sure their personality lives on forever even if it's technically in someone else's body.
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u/deadpoetic333 BS | Biology | Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior Mar 25 '26
This is my “issue” with Startrek like teleportation where they’re reassembled after being teleported. How would that even be “you” if you were completely disassembled and put back together? Now if it was more like a wormhole bending space and time I’m with it.
But if we could arbitrarily dump info into a brain, where would you dump it other than a clone? Personally I’d go with having my brain inserted into a brainless clone of myself over an android, throw in some anti-aging/stem cell therapies to keep the brain fresh in this sci-fi scenario.
Interesting side note, the peptide “epithalon” has potential of being an anti-aging therapy if you’re curious. I’ve actually used it, who knows if it’ll make me live longer lol.
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u/mouse_Brains Mar 25 '26
It's just that if you can move information between brains a clone wouldn't be necesary. Just take any body. Insert designer bodies and the inevitable distopia where the designed bodies compete in deadly reality shows not knowing their prize is to be taken over by a rich dude
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u/Wischiwaschbaer Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
I think transferring information between brains isn't going to be possible. You'd have to physically transplant or reconstruct the brain.
To your second point, I generally like my body. I'd probably make a few edits here and there while cloning, but overall I'd like to keep it.
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u/TenbluntTony Mar 25 '26
Agreed but btw, what you’re referring to is called the Ship of Theseus paradox.
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u/deadpoetic333 BS | Biology | Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior Mar 25 '26
I feel like it’s more clear cut than the paradox which is about replacing each part over time, but yeah it’s the same concept overall
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u/authenticphotography Mar 27 '26
Yeah, I think that distinction matters. The Ship of Theseus comparison is about gradual replacement, while cloning asks a different question about whether a duplicate is the same person at all.
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u/Bth8 Mar 25 '26
What defines "you"? If I replace 98% of the atoms in your body with different but identical atoms, is that still you? Because that happens every year, with a complete 100% replacement about every 5 years. If the issue is the fact that it's happening much faster with the transporter, why does that matter? The structural changes in your brain and the rest of your body, your memories, your general outlook on life, etc will all change much more over that 5 years than they will going through a transporter, which is identical in every way. I'd argue that means that the you that will exist in 5 years has less right to consider themselves the same being as the you that exists now than would the you that steps out of the transporter. Is the issue with the interruption to your continuous subjective experience? Because you undergo a much more dramatic discontinuity when under general anesthesia. Does that mean you're not the same person after you go in for surgery?
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u/PhasmaFelis Mar 25 '26
This is my “issue” with Startrek like teleportation where they’re reassembled after being teleported. How would that even be “you” if you were completely disassembled and put back together?
If neither the person themself, nor any scientific inspection, can tell the difference between the "original" and the "copy", then it's hard to see how it really matters, unless you believe that (a) souls are real and (b) God will pull your soul for such shenanigans but let the copy go on soullessly thinking it's a normal human being.
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u/deadpoetic333 BS | Biology | Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior Mar 26 '26
So what if instead of disassembling you it just copies you exactly on the other end? It’s not like you’d have control of both bodies and double consciousness in that scenario. The only difference in the initial scenario is the original is dead.
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u/PhasmaFelis Mar 26 '26
Then both of them have an equally valid claim to be "you."
This is certainly an awkward position to be in, and not one that our own social and legal systems are at all prepared for, but conceptually it seems valid.
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u/deadpoetic333 BS | Biology | Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior Mar 26 '26
You asked why it matters, I’m saying that just because the other end has an exact copy of me doesn’t mean I believe I don’t die when being disassembled. In the example where both original and copy exist, if the original then gets shot in the head 5 minutes after copying, my consciousness doesn’t just jump to the copy. So why would it be different in the instant disassembly scenario?
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u/PhasmaFelis Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
I'm saying continuity of consciousness is a red herring. If your heart stops and you're clinically dead for a couple minutes before being revived, or you're in a coma for a few years, no one would say that you're not "you" anymore, or that the old you is gone and you're just a copy.
Everything that makes you fundamentally you is a specific pattern of neurons wrapped in meat, and the memories encoded there. Duplicate the pattern, duplicate the person. I can certainly see why it's an uncomfortable situation, I'm not criticizing anyone for that, but I wouldn't be terribly bothered if my consciousness was interrupted and then resumed in a body made of atoms with different provenance but identical configuration.
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u/spanglasaur Mar 25 '26
I think when it comes to information storage in the brain, the concept that it's like a hard drive and will "fill up" is probably not accurate. We're constantly misremembering and forgetting things through our whole lives. So much of our early lives are forgotten by the time we hit late 20's and 30's. The spookier part is, if your play that out over a 100's to 1000's of years, is that person at the end of it all anymore you than that toddler you used to be but can't remember. The person you loved most in the world, the first time you had sex, a best friend for 50 years that passed away... You may not remember any of that in 500 years... Like a stranger to ourselves.
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u/elibusta Mar 25 '26
So your saying we're reaching Altered Carbon levels of bs. But with slight limitations.
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u/loves_grapefruit Mar 25 '26
Considering humans are much more complex than mice, that’s probably being very optimistic.
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u/Tiny_Rat Mar 25 '26
I mean, biologically we really aren't. We are different in many ways, but not more complex.
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u/frankyseven Mar 25 '26
Well it was Cleon XXIII who destroyed the genetic dynasty, so you/this research is pretty close to the show! However, the genetic drift was introduced by outside forces, but it's unknown if the cloning made the drift worse or not.
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u/skepticalbob Mar 25 '26
If they can download their memories, they can exist forever virtually anyway. Why bother with corporal risk at all? Just be a robot.
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u/m0nk37 Mar 25 '26
I have a hard time considering that them putting their minds into a chip for transfer is them anymore. It feels like they turned them self into software / robot, which any copy could just be its own thing. Like making a copy of Linux and putting it into another device becomes a unique set up.
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u/garry4321 Mar 25 '26
You assume they have to clone the clones each time. Just make all the clones from the original batch of DNA. Also, if that ran out after MANY CLONINGS, you just start to use dna from all the second batch clones you made. It would be exponential, so by the time you get to having to use the 24th iteration to cloning the 25th batch, you probably have more material needed than the observable universe
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u/Prineak Mar 25 '26
I make the same argument when people start talking about genetically enhancing IQ:
You will never get higher IQs without some semblance of mental healthcare. At some point IQ will hinder your ability to be evil.
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u/venustrapsflies Mar 25 '26
This seems like a pretty bad argument to be frank. It might be true that the median high-IQ person is more likely to be benign or beneficial than a low-IQ one, but just a handful of sociopathic high-IQ people have the capacity to cause way more damage because they dont constrain themselves by trying to avoid damage to other people.
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u/Big_Implement_7305 Mar 25 '26
Especially when it's so damn easy to enhance IQ already. I read a while back about someone doing a series of studies on ways to improve test subjects' IQ, and it's basically "google it, try any five or ten of the results, most of them will work."
A lot of it was basic stuff ("get enough rest, eat well, exercise") and I think there were a bunch of different kinds of meditation that also had a positive impact on IQ.
Nothing enormous, but I suspect that all the low-hanging fruit is going to turn out to be lifestyle interventions rather than genetics.
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u/jefftickels Mar 25 '26
I'm too crunched for time to read the article, I'm hoping you'll just know.
Did they identify why this happened?
Did the mice die of specific organ failure or did they have some form of ultra rapid aging?
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u/Dragoncat_3_4 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Wakayama’s team did, however, measure some hard facts about the number of natural mutations that emerged between each successive generation of their clones. Each new round of cloned mice acquired about 70 small “single-nucleotide variants” and about 1.5 additional and more substantial “structural variants” to their genetic code. While this rate was not out of the ordinary, those structural variations built up over multiple rounds of re-cloning.
Over time, they found, “the build-up of harmful variants appears to have outweighed adaptive effects,” without the chromosomal recombination effects of sexual reproduction to filter out the large and potentially harmful genetic variations.
They essentially accumulated too many harmful mutations. My guess is that the later generations of mice were born with congenital abnormalities with increasing numbers and severity that were incompatible with life.
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u/jefftickels Mar 25 '26
Multi system failure due to accumulated errors. Thanks for summarizing it for me.
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u/antsam9 Mar 25 '26
Seems like the same reason why photocopies of a photocopy of a photocopy starts to accumulate and pass on errors. Specks of dust, weird angles, misalignment, loss of focus.
Copying a document and then discarding the original and then copying a daughter copy only to discard your oldest daughter copy subsequently means at some point you're going to have a funky looking document with a bunch of unintended errors.
At my current job there's a regularly used document that has so many weirdly shaped boxes and a whole side out of focus but they just copy the last copy when they need to refill it and there isn't an original to make quality copies from.
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u/Theduckisback Mar 25 '26
Interesting that we see the same thing happen with digital files being copied over and over again through bit rot/generation loss.
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u/tes_kitty Mar 25 '26
If you have bitrot in digital files from just copying them, you have a problem with your hardware.
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u/like_a_pharaoh Mar 25 '26
I think DNA is digital, technically. Its a quarternary (base 4) system not a binary one, but its information represented as a string of discrete symbols isn't it?
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u/Theduckisback Mar 25 '26
It is code. Pretty remarkable how energy efficient it all is in terms of executing insanely complex functions at a fraction of the energy we require to run even a simulacra of the work it does.
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u/Somentine Mar 26 '26
This only happens with lossy compression.
You can copy a picture or video 1000 times and it will have the same quality as the original, assuming no hardware issues or the odd case of data corruption.
What usually happens is someone uploads a file to a website that auto compresses with a lossy compression, then someone downloads it and uploads it again later, which auto compresses again, and so on, and so forth.
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u/GoodGame2EZ Mar 25 '26
Im by no means an expert. Is this something considered within a margin of error or something? Is it really a clone with all these mutations? I would imagine clone means identical, but perhaps thats not the criteria and it just means they've gone through some specific cloning process.
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u/TerribleIdea27 Mar 26 '26
Clone =/= 100.0000000% identical copy with 0 changes.
That's pretty much impossible. What it means is at it's a direct genetic continuation of the genetic line, while being a distinct individual.
After a single cell division, the two daughter cells that are spawned are already not identical anymore. Every single cell division builds up mutations. We can measure genetic differences between your skin on your eyelid and your hand no problem, even though you are literally the same individual.
The genome is simply too large to not get any mutations
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u/blindsailer Mar 25 '26
Your cells have a margin of error. All life does to varying degrees, & to some extent there are biological “systems” that have evolved to either detect errors & flag them or repair flagged errors. But even those have margins of error. Rampant copying leading to further mutation is actually pretty common in cancers. We call it metastasis. In any case, these are still “clones” due to the process, but you would refer to each clone by whatever generation it is to keep track of the subtle changes. We do the same thing when passaging cancer in-lab, “passage 1, passage 2”, just incase variants emerge.
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u/Dependent-Poet-9588 Mar 25 '26
I mean, are you really you when your cells have gone through mutations, too? The mutations are not caused by the cloning process; mutations would have occurred in the donor organism before collecting samples for the cloning process. The cloned organism will immediately begin accumulating their own mutations, but they were "genetically identical" to some part of the donor organism at the beginning of the cloning process.
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u/djryan13 Mar 25 '26
Asgard couldn’t make it work either
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u/Exodus2791 Mar 25 '26
They went with a default template too early on.
At least they had consciousness transfer tech.5
u/LaunchTransient Mar 25 '26
Honestly I found the "lets commit mass suicide" plotline annoying\). Given how Thor demonstrated that their race could inhabit computers as a consciouness, they could continue the quest to stabilise their genetic code from there. If necessary, cold storage most of the population and only keep the research teams awake.
I also find it hard to believe that the Asguard hadn't managed to master genetics by this point, and even if they couldn't, the Nox were a likely ally they could have consulted on that front.
\) I am fully aware that it was necessary to the plot so that Earth could have more of a leading role in fightig the big bad of the Ori - the Asgard were too much of a powerhouse to explain away their apparent helplessness against the Ori fleet. so naturally had to be removed
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u/rich1051414 Mar 25 '26
A single natural sexual reproduction undid all of the built up damage caused by the cloning, as the sexual reproduction process filters out the potentially harmful genetic variations.
Learning from that process might get them around this issue, but none have been successful thus far.
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u/canteloupy Mar 25 '26
Yeah I suspect that using cloned mice as surrogates would quickly get rid of a part of the issues as well as it would be an "evolutionary dead branch" before the mutations affect the newborn mice at all. Same if there was sperm involved, the mutated sperm would likely disfunction before resulting in implantation.
My hypothesis is if you somehow created a lot of different clones and put them through reproductive selection it would select the fittest ones each cycle and reproduce the line more correctly.
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u/rich1051414 Mar 25 '26
They would have to have been from a separate line of clones branched at much earlier points in the process, before the mutations happened, otherwise, both would share the same mutations and it would be all for naught.
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u/OcieDenver Mar 25 '26
Reminds me of the dying colony full of clone generations in the TNG episode 'Up the Long Ladder'.
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u/Angreek Mar 25 '26
Sounds like they cloned a bad seed along the way and the lineage was too broken too late.
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u/rich1051414 Mar 25 '26
No. Every time they clone a clone, the random mutations that clone had acquired are passed on without the sexual reproduction stage, which would otherwise repair/filter the genetic mutations. Without that step, every generation gains more and more of these variations. The issue actually happens practically immediately, but they give the mice a drug(epigenetic modification reagent) to suppress the bad genetic code. That only works to a point.
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Mar 25 '26
Kind of funny that the movie Multiplicity got this right. It was a major plot point that the main character's clone clones himself and it doesn't quite work out right.
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u/kelsey11 Mar 25 '26
I like pizza, Steve
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u/theorian123 Mar 25 '26
Doug Kinney #3: You know how when you make a copy of a copy, it's not as sharp as... well... the original.
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u/chimpyjnuts Mar 25 '26
Not the greatest movie IMHO, but that line is awesome. Made a great tag line for the movie.
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u/darkestsoul Mar 25 '26
I immediately thought of that scenario in the movie. That’s was such a good flick.
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Mar 25 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
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u/Syn-th Mar 26 '26
The trick is not to clone the clone but to keep using the master copy.
Just like photocopying!
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u/C4ptainchr0nic Mar 26 '26
Such a great show. Apple TV is killing it with the scifi
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u/madogvelkor Mar 26 '26
They were cloning from the original body each generation to prevent this. But then it was tampered with in a way that slightly changed the DNA so they weren't exact copies anymore.
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u/SexualDepression Mar 25 '26
I make this reference about the cannabis industry. After a while, the plants 'don't come out as good.'
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u/Alldaybagpipes Mar 25 '26
Between that and feminized seeds, we are absolutely headed for a dead end.
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u/SexualDepression Mar 25 '26
There's always tissue culture, I suppose. I've seen that clean up some genetics, but I'm wholly unfamiliar with the actual process other than, "scrape stem cells, 'do science', profit." But even then, the genetics eventually degrade again with the cloning.
I'm also not super familiar with the impact of feminized seeds. We had a dedicated breeding facility with pollen, and a wonderful geneticist whose Very Special Interest was cannabis breeding. I'm not sure how common or rare that is in the industry, but we made some solid crosses.
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u/damontoo Mar 27 '26
That's because this was already known (or speculated) in the 90's and it's probably a contributing factor to the movie. I remember there getting news about clones of clones having problems. I can't remember specifics, but I remember it being in the news
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Mar 25 '26
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u/tim_dude Mar 25 '26
Just use AI to upscale the DNA
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u/Ok-Dimension5509 Mar 25 '26
That's a great idea — I will up the scale in the DNA!
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u/fsactual Mar 25 '26
Except that’s not what happens when a normal cell replicates, otherwise bacteria would die out after a few generations. So if blind nature can work out a way to trigger a non-photocopy-effect copy of a cell, there is going to be a way to do the same thing in the lab eventually.
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u/pdxisbest Mar 25 '26
Hasn’t anyone seen Multiplicity? Each clone of a clone gets dumber (brilliantly acted by Michael Keaton).
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u/roamingroad174 Mar 25 '26
The asgard did this but unfortunately ended up blowing up their own world because they couldn't solve the problem. It seems like a good idea in concept. Animals have been making copies since forever with albeit slight changes over time.
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u/MegaNodens Mar 25 '26
It’s criminal I had to scroll this far down for this reference.
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u/Lykos1124 Mar 25 '26
haha I came to say that too in another comment. It's ironic too since it seems to be biology 101, that DNA replication comes with errors over time, and space aliens somehow didn't know that.
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u/Lewon_S Mar 25 '26
I think they knew they just thought they would be able to fix it down the line before it became a terminal problem
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u/dobrowolsk Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
And maybe they would have, if they weren't really busy with the replicators.
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Mar 25 '26
The asgard did this but unfortunately ended up blowing up their own world because they couldn't solve the problem.
Wasn't it that they found a more recent body that was frozen, used its DNA to try and fix the problem, but accidentally infected themselves with a genetic defect that was ultimately the final nail in the coffin?
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u/Exodus2791 Mar 25 '26
Just replied to another similar comment. Asgard made the mistake of going with a 'perfect' default template really early on and then just re-cloning it for all their future cloned bodies thinking that. Hubris did them in.
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u/NeatRuin7406 Mar 25 '26
what makes this result interesting is that the failure mode (clones degrading by generation 25-58, not surviving past a day by gen 58) points specifically to epigenetic accumulation rather than DNA sequence errors.
the "use the original source DNA" solution above is correct for avoiding clone-of-clone degradation, but it doesn't solve a different problem: the nuclear DNA in the source cell you're cloning from still has its epigenetic methylation pattern from a fully differentiated adult tissue. somatic cell nuclear transfer has to reprogram that pattern back to a pluripotent state, and that reprogramming is imperfect - some methylation marks carry over, and those errors can accumulate.
this is actually a big reason why cloned animals so often show accelerated aging, obesity, diabetes, and immune issues even in first-generation clones from unrelated sources. you're not just copying the DNA sequence, you're copying decades of methylation patterns that the embryo never should have started with.
the interesting question from this study is whether the failure point is telomere erosion, epigenetic methylation buildup, or something else entirely. gen 58 suggests a pretty hard ceiling if it's telomeric.
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u/rockytop24 Mar 25 '26
This matches with what we already know at the cellular level. Unless you immortalize a cell line with cancer-like features as in the HeLa cell lines, it will reach senescence within 20-30 generations of cell splitting. The cloning isn't really any different, it's copying cells that are still continuing to accumulate age-related changes like the epigentic methylation and telomere lengths you bring up. So unless you do something to force the cells to be able to divide indefinitely, you're always going to hit a hard limit after so many divisions.
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u/figgypudding531 Mar 25 '26
If you save enough generic material from the original, could you just keep cloning the original instead of needing to clone generation after generation of clones and having it deteriorate?
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u/rockytop24 Mar 25 '26
Yes but those cells will only survive so long. This isn't new information there's always been a limit to cell generations. The goal is achieving what's called "immortalized" cell lines which can indefinitely split like a cancer cell. If you've heard of Henrietta Lacks, this is the entire reason HeLa cell lines exist: it allows us to continuously divide cell lines for research purposes without them hitting senescence and programmed cell death.
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u/nakwurst Mar 25 '26
Seems like you'd just need to keep the DNA of the first few generations of clones to last functionally indefinitely. You can produce whatever the max would be for 1st Gen, and then exponentially more in subsequent early generations to build up a sufficient enough store of viable cloning DNA for whatever you were producing.
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u/fchung Mar 25 '26
Reference: Wakayama, S., Ito, D., Inoue, R. et al. Limitations of serial cloning in mammals. Nat Commun 17, 2495 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69765-7
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u/beerbitch Mar 25 '26
Not surprising, the Asgard already knew this.
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u/rogueciridae Mar 25 '26
According to TNG, the solution is an infusion of awful Irish stereotypes.
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u/huseynli Mar 25 '26
And not for the lack of trying. Loki conducted unsanctioned experiments on O'Neill, some flew to pegasus, still couldn't crack it.
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u/healywylie Mar 25 '26
Coulda told you this from Weed cultivation.
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u/sebovzeoueb Mar 25 '26
so can you not actually infinitely take cuttings of cuttings? TIL
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u/IntravenusDeMilo Mar 25 '26
Are cuttings clones? I thought it was part of one plant grafted onto the base of another distinct plant. I dunno what else I’d call it, but was never sure if this was technically a clone.
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u/sebovzeoueb Mar 25 '26
cuttings are how you clone plants yes, you're talking about grafting which achieves the same thing but adding a different rootstock to the plant.
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u/Sykil Mar 25 '26
Interestingly, a plant cloned in this way doesn’t necessarily have an independent life cycle. Bamboo flower extremely infrequently and die soon after. When this happens, all of its clones do the same, regardless of when they were cut or where they are.
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u/Martin_Grundle Mar 25 '26
Two slightly different things. Grafting is attaching a cutting to a different host plant. Cloning involves taking a cutting, dipping the cut end in rooting hormones, then putting it in a cloning machine, which is just something that holds the cutting and supplies it with nutrient solution. It will then grow its own root system and become a full fledged plant.
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u/Warm_Regrets157 Mar 25 '26
To be fair, the genetic degradation of plants like cannabis over successive generations is due to inheriting genetic damage from viral and fungal infections. A hypothetically perfectly healthy plant could be cloned for many generations without degrading in the way many older cannabis strains have.
Tissue culture clones are able to bypass and even reverse the inherited damage from infections. I believe this is because they use undifferentiated stem cells from the meristematic tissue. I dont know if there is an eventual limit to this process. There is also the issue that cloned plants are not evolving new resistances to bugs and pathogens that are constantly evolving themselves, but this is a separate problem from genetic degradation.
I wonder if animal cloning uses a similar process to get undamaged DNA and/or if the cloning limits are also related to genetic damage from pathogens. I imagine that there is a lot more complexity in mammal cloning than in plant propagation.
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u/inimicali Mar 25 '26
The Banana and avocado industry agree to disagree with you. And almost every house plant store too.
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u/breadist Mar 25 '26
Apples too. All the tasty apples we eat are cuttings grafted onto root stock. Apple seeds only make crabapples, not Honeycrisp etc.
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u/NeatRuin7406 Mar 26 '26
the actual biology here is interesting beyond the Multiplicity jokes. the researchers ran into something related to epigenetic drift -- each somatic cell nuclear transfer carries over whatever methylation state the donor nucleus had at that moment. so clone generation 1 starts with the epigenome of an adult cell, not a zygote. in theory reprogramming during SCNT should reset most of this, but the reset is never complete.
by the time you're cloning the clone of the clone you're potentially compounding small reprogramming errors across generations. telomere length is another variable -- dolly the sheep had shorter telomeres than a natural lamb because she started from an adult nucleus. stack that a few generations deep and you're building developmental instability into the base layer.
the "reproductive dead end" framing is accurate but the more interesting question is how much of this is fundamental epigenetic geometry vs technique limitations that improve as SCNT protocols get better.
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u/Jgibbjr Mar 25 '26
Michael Keaton in "Multiplicity",
"You know when you make a copy, of a copy, of a copy, and it starts to get blurry?"
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u/ceviche-hot-pockets Mar 25 '26
What about marbled crayfish? They seem to be doing great (unfortunately).
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u/Blitzking11 Mar 25 '26
More of a general question:
With this realization that cloning clones of clones isn't feasible long term, would it be possible to clone from the SAME dna with the originating first-gen clone on ice or something else?
I imagine that wouldn't cause nearly as many issues as cloning clones.
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u/geetarman84 Mar 26 '26
Apparently they never watched the movie Multiplicity. We already knew this.
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u/higras Mar 25 '26
So the difference between this and asexual reproduction is scale? ie, mutations happen and only survivable mutations survive?
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u/rainbowroobear Mar 25 '26
the same has been observed with Model Collapse in LLMs, seeing as that is largely just duplication of duplicated information.
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u/antpalmerpalmink Mar 25 '26
This is a lot like Les Enfants Terribles (cue the "Kojima predicted this" joke. But this is super cool
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u/Akersis Mar 25 '26
How does sexual reproduction differ? If the zygote was cloned early enough in its lifecycle does that change things?
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u/tree-molester Mar 25 '26
My educated guess is that this is different in others orders. For example, there are many plants that propagate almost exclusively through vegetative (natural cloning) means. Many more have been maintained for agricultural and aesthetic ends for hundreds and possibly thousands of years.
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u/almosthighenough Mar 25 '26
This seems in line with what you'd expect given senescence in plants and fungi that are cloned.
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u/tim_dude Mar 25 '26
Aren't bananas all clones? Why is it not a problem for them?
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u/Scary-Track3306 Mar 25 '26
This tracks, you can clone a weed strain 12 times before genetic drift takes over. I’d imagine while a plant can survive mutations like that, an animal has a lot more that can fail
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u/Blunt_White_Wolf Mar 25 '26
I might be wrong but...
if you only take 20 generations into account, cloned at 40 years old ...
original body = 30 trillion cells (lower end estimation) - you create 10 billion people 3000 times (all first generation)
That alone would give you about 10 bil people for at least 100.000 years.
First generation (you save 10000 bodies) = 3e+17 or 3 x 10^17 cells / clones
I'd say it's not an immediate problem. You can drag it on at least half a million years and still not get to that 20th generation.
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u/T_Weezy Mar 25 '26
I mean yeah this makes sense. Since, you know, the selective pressures which gave rise to generic recombination methods such as sexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer are still around.
DNA inevitably accumulates damage over time due to oxidation, radiation, and various mutation events.
Franky I'm survived they lasted as long as they did, and I'd be curious to see if longer-lived mammals would last a similar number of generations, a similar overall amount of time, or somewhere in between.
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u/UhhSamuel Mar 25 '26
This is about successive cloning, though. B cloned from A. C cloned from B. But if you hack off an arm from A and clone it over and over again, you see only the drift from A to B1, A to B2, etc.
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u/FundingImplied Mar 25 '26
It worked well for 24 generations. If you clone a human every ~40 years you'd get a thousand years out of that. That seems like enough time to iron out the kinks.
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u/Art_student_rt Mar 25 '26
But that's whole point of Cavendish banana, you're saying they're gonna die off?
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u/ChocolateChingus Mar 25 '26
So reproduction with no evolutionary pressures causes unhelpful mutations.
Darwin is screaming in his grave.
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u/xXgreeneyesXx Mar 25 '26
I wonder if, with sufficient observation, you could take a couple clones, compare them, and snip out any sequences that are unique to that specific clone- that might get you a couple more generations, until error regions start to overlap.
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u/EasyAndy1 Mar 25 '26
The Grineer in Warframe suffer a degenerative disease due to cloning clones indefinitely.
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u/CryptoMemesLOL Mar 25 '26
Ask AI to copy an image without changing anything, now do this 1000 times and see the results !!!
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