Question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO CLONE ONE DIRECTION???

Amy Monaghan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

Hey there Albertdarwin

So the good(?) news is that yes, it probably would be possible to clone One Direction. The bad news is unfortunately we’re not allowed to.

Cloning of mammals has been around for quite a while. Most of the mice used in animal experiments are clones to keep variation between results to a minimum.

Have you heard of Dolly the Sheep? Dolly was created at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. She had three mothers – one provided the egg cell which is part of the normal reproductive process. However instead of fusing with sperm, researchers took the nucleus (the DNA control center) from another adult sheep and put this into the egg. This means Dolly had exactly the same DNA as an existing adult sheep. This new cell was then implanted into ANOTHER sheep to grow into a lamb and HEY PRESTO – Dolly was born.

Dolly lived until 2003, and is now on display at the National Museum in Edinburgh. Unfortunately she was not healthy all her life – this is because the DNA used to clone Dolly was already the age of an adult, so as a young lamb she had many of the problems that an older sheep has. Cloning adult humans would give the same problem. Other large mammals such as cows and horses have also been cloned, and some scientists believe that they may be able to clone and restore extinct species using other closely related animals as donor mothers.

However it would also be very unethical to clone humans, what would the clones be used for? What would their identity be? Would you want somebody the exact same as you wandering around? Having said this – you might know some human clones, if you know any identical twins they are natural clones! So maybe you just need to keep hoping that Harry, Zayn, Louis, Liam and Niall all have twin brothers!

Amy