Cloning Quotes

“The sky was on fire.”
― Kyoko M., Of Dawn & Embers

“The way to be invisible - is to truly be imaginary. But since you cannot imagine yourself, you have to clone your imagination into being an image of yourself. Imagine that.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Jack...why is there a dragon in our backyard?”
― Kyoko M., Of Dawn & Embers

“I’m one of twenty-three orphan prodigies. We were created using genetic engineering technologies that have been suppressed from the mainstream. I’m at least half a century ahead of our times in terms of official science. The embryologists who created me selected the strongest genes from about a thousand sperm donors then used in-vitro fertilization to impregnate my mother and other women.”
― James Morcan, The Ninth Orphan

“The nurse pointed out that identical twins were already clones in a sense, and Mother Emmanuel suggested that the soul to worry about belonged to the person who would have himself cloned at great expense when so many unwanted children were going hungry.”
― Mark Salzman, Lying Awake

“How would I know which one I was?”
― Karl Pilkington

“Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Elms are dying all over the place, it's Dutch elm disease. [...] It came from America on a load of logs, and it's a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that's why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you'd never think it was part of all the others. You'd see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Double You by Stewart Stafford

Life can make a twin of you,
When you occupy the same air,
You can't feel them twinning you,
Until your doppelgänger's there.

You're twice the Sapien you were,
Cloned and replicated new fellows,
You're not feeling yourself just now,
Feats and phrases are all echoes.

But if someone seeks out a quote,
You tell them to ask the mirror you,
Only things trumping who you are,
Are you and matching Double You.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“- My love is about 2/3rds as invisible as her love, and that sort of transparency isn’t really all that healthy in a relationship.
- I chop trees down with my sharpened mustache, remember? Cloning works, but can lead you in the wrong direction.
-Jarod Kintz and Stefan D”
― Stefan D

“Experiences and memories make us who we are, not just our genes.”
― Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness

“If we are made in his image. How will that change in this next stage in our evolution? Where we have cloning of individuals and gene manipulation to enhance ourselves. Are we changing what that image is?”
― James Hauenstein

“You could clone Elvis Presley and, while the clone would look identical, it would not have the utterly unique life experiences that made The King who he was. After all that time, effort and expense, the clone might choose to be a gardener instead of a singer! There's also the ethical dilemma of recreating all the genetic problems Elvis had due to his maternal grandparents being first cousins.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The time when perfection was of the order of crime is over, when beneath perfect beauty something criminal lay hidden. With the cloning and recycling of the species in conformity with an ideal norm, it will no longer even be a crime to be perfect. The exactitude of the creature will shine in the genetic firmament. There will be a universal presumption of innocence and a total excommunication of evil. This technical redemption of all the taints of the species will render any new divine intervention useless. There will no longer be any Last Judgement.

Reality for us is a little like the ground for trapeze artists, who work with a net without knowing that beneath it the ground has disappeared.
In this way, screens allowed the real to slip away. In this way, icons allowed God to slip quietly away.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species.

In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“True immortality is the immortality of childhood and adolescence, where you never think you will have to die one day. The phantasm of immortality is merely the price paid for the certainty of dying. And it is ready to pay any price, including that of annihilating itself to achieve immortality.
In the past, some were prepared to lose their souls (their hope of eternal life) in a pact with the Devil to enjoy the privileges of mortal existence. Today we are ready to sacrifice any idea of a future immortality for a present corporeal immortality, a perpetual renewal in cloning. Immortality is no longer a metaphor. We want a real immortality, we want a technical incarnation of it here and now. This is the new pact with the Devil, sealed and signed in blood by the human race, which prefers to be cryogenized alive rather than await some hypothetical resurrection of bodies.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“What, if not a death drive, would impel sexual beings towards a pre sexual form of reproduction (in the depths of our imagination, moreover, is it not precisely this scissiparous form of reproduction and proliferation based solely on contiguity that for us is death and the death drive?). And what, if not a death drive, would further impel us at the same time, on the metaphysical plane, to deny all otherness, to shun any alteration in the Same, and to seek nothing beyond the perpetuation of an identity, nothing but the transparency of a genetic inscription no longer subject even to the vicissitudes of procreation?
But enough of the death drive. Are we faced here with a phantasy of selfgenesis? No, because such phantasies always involve the figures of the mother and the father - sexed parental figures whom the subject may indeed yearn to eliminate, the better to usurp their positions, but this in no sense implies contesting the symbolic structure of procreation: if you become your own child, you are still the child of someone. Cloning, on the other hand, radically eliminates not only the mother but also the father, for it eliminates the interaction between his genes and the mother's, the imbrication of the parents' differences, and above all the joint act of procreation.
The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts from each of his genes' segments. One may well speculate about the value of such plant-like shoots, which in effect resolve all Oedipal sexuality in favour of a 'non-human' sex, a sex based on contiguity and unmediated propagation. But at all events the phantasy of self-genesis is definitively out of the picture. Father and mother are gone, but their disappearance, far from widening an aleatory freedom for the subject, instead leaves the way clear for a matrix known as a code. No more mother, no more father: just a matrix. And it is this matrix, this genetic code, which is destined to 'give birth', from now till eternity, in an operational mode from which all chance sexual elements have been expunged.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“A gene segment has no more need of an imaginary mediation in order to reproduce than does an earthworm, any segment of which can reproduce autonomously as an entire worm. Any cell of an American chief executive officer likewise suffices to produce a new chief executive officer. Similarly, any portion of a hologram may become the matrix of a new complete hologram: each discrete portion of the original hologram contains all the information needed for reproduction (though a slight loss of definition may occur).
This is how the totality is eliminated. If all information is contained in each of its parts, the whole loses its significance. This means the end of the body also, the end of that unique object which we call the body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be broken down into an accumulation of cells because it is an indivisible configuration - as witness the very fact that it is sexed.
Paradoxically, cloning is destined to continue producing sexed beings indefinitely - clones must, of course, remain identical to their model - even as it turns sex itself into a useless function; not that sex was ever a function: on the contrary, it is what makes a body a body, something which transcends all that body's diverse functions. Sex (or death) is something that transcends the entirety of the information that can be collected concerning a given body. The genetic formula, by contrast, contains all such information, but cannot transcend it. It must therefore find its own autonomous path to reproduction, independently of sexuality and death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The subject, too, is gone, because identical duplication ends the division that constitutes him. The mirror stage is abolished by the cloning process - or, perhaps more accurately, is monstrously parodied therein. For the same reason cloning keeps nothing of the timeless narcissistic dream of the subject's projection into an ideal alter ego, for this projection too works by means of an image - the image in the mirror, in which the subject becomes alienated in order to rediscover himself, or that seductive and mortal image in which the subject recognizes himself as a prelude to his death. Nothing of all this is left with cloning. No more mediations - no more images: an individual product on the conveyor belt is in no sense a reflection of the next (albeit identical) product in line. The one is never a mirage, whether ideal or mortal, of the other: they can only accumulate, and if that is so it is precisely because they have not been sexually engendered and are unacquainted with death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“With the advent of cloning, this kind of thing is occurring not just at the level of messages but also in terms of individuals. Indeed, this is exactly what happens to the body when it is conceived of as nothing more than a message, nothing more than computer fodder. In such circumstances there is no obstacle in the way of a mass reproduction of the body exactly comparable to the mass reproduction of industrial objects and mass-media images described by Benjamin. Thus reproduction precedes production, and the genetic model of the body precedes all possible bodies. An exploding technology is what presides over this reversal - that technology which Benjamin was already able to describe, in its ultimate consequences, as a total medium; but Benjamin was writing in the industrial era: by then technology itself was a gigantic prosthesis governing the generation of identical objects and images which there was no longer any way of distinguishing from one another, but it was as yet impossible to foresee the technological sophistication of our own era, which has made it possible to generate identical beings, without any means of returning to an original. The prostheses of the industrial era were still external, exotechnical, whereas those we know now are ramified and internalized -esotechnical. Ours is the age of soft technologies, the age of genetic and mental software.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“There is a close connection between the key concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer. Cancer implies an infinite proliferation of a basic cell in complete disregard of the laws governing the organism as a whole. Similarly, in cloning, all obstacles to the extension of the reign of the Same are removed; nothing inhibits the proliferation of a single matrix. Formerly sexual reproduction constituted a barrier, but now at last it has become possible to isolate the genetic matrix of identity; consequently it will be possible to eliminate all the differences that have hitherto made individuals charming in their unpredictability.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today.
If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out.
Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“我們只是培育了他們的後備，等着，等到需要的時候，就用得着了。汽車的行李箱中有後備胎，沒有人知道它會替換四隻原來車胎中的哪一隻。但是四隻在使用中的車胎，一定會有一隻變壞⋯足球隊都有後備隊員，也沒有人會知哪一個正式球員會出毛病。後備放在那裏，用得到，就用，用不到，也沒有損失，因為我們已累積了相當的經驗，要培育一個後備，並不是甚麼難事。”
― 倪匡, 後備