Don’t lay down a big bet on human cloning happening anytime soon
Q. Whatever happened to that almost-famous “pen for the atomic age”? A. Although the “Atomic Pen” made a cameo appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Parker Pen Company that developed it in 1958 never mass produced it, says Evan Ackerman in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. The show-stopper? The pen was radioactive, calling for “a tiny packet of radioactive isotopes that would heat the ink to produce a selectable range of line densities.” Yet, back in 1958, “in an era promising atomic cars and atomic planes, it no doubt seemed perfectly reasonable.” Q. What are the odds on a few scientific breakthroughs for humanity within the next 10 years or so, such as establishing a permanent Mars colony and cloning humans? A. Consultant Michael Brooks, writing in “New Scientist” magazine, asked the experts and bookmaker PaddyPower for their input. For a permanent Mars colony by 2027, the bookie’s odds were 33/1. Recently, billionaire venture capitalist Elon Musk announced plans to establish a Mars colony in the 2020s, but astrobiologist Lewis Darnell is skeptical: It’s an 18-month trip from Earth, and “Mars is a brutal and unforgiving environment,” a daunting place indeed to establish a self-governing human colony that’s food and energy independent. He hopes for a colony within 50 years but thinks even that is overly optimistic.
Now consider human cloning, with bookie’s odds at 10/1 against a viable human clone by 2027. Cows, mice, chickens and, most famously, sheep have been successfully cloned, but with humans, many technical hurdles remain. “Cloning is hard to perfect and live births are elusive.” For example, it took 277 attempts to clone Dolly, the first sheep that lived to adulthood, mated and gave birth to lambs normally. However, she developed osteoarthritis and died from a lung disease at the relatively young age of 6.
Moreover, in primates, structures vital for cell division sit very close to the cell nucleus and tend to get damaged during extraction, leading to potentially “catastrophic errors.” As UK researcher Alison Murdoch sees it, the bookie’s assessment seems rather optimistic. “As a scientist, I can’t ever say never, but I estimate the odds being close to zero.” Q. Are you one of the 200 million or so people expected to travel to one of 12 states (from Oregon to South Carolina) to view the first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse (TSE) in nearly a century? A. In fact, it could become one of the most watched eclipses in history, writes Sid Perkins in “Science News” magazine, reviewing three recent books on the subject. A TSE occurs when the moon passes in front of the sun and blocks its entire face, seen from the vantage of Earth. As astronomer Anthony Aveni explains in “In the Shadow of the Moon,” “TSEs arise from a fluke of geometry that occurs nowhere else in the solar system”: the sun is 400 times as large as our moon but also 400 times farther away, making the moon just the right size to cover the sun’s face without blocking its corona.
And this fluke of geometry is also a fluke of history. As planetary scientist John Dvorak points out in “Mask of the Sun,” “because the moon’s orbit drifts about four centimeters farther from Earth each year, there will come a time when the moon will no longer appear to cover the sun.”
Also, in many instances a lunar eclipse occurs two weeks before a solar eclipse—“a coincidence that may have helped ancient astrologers ‘predict’ an eclipse,” physicist Frank Close writes in “Eclipse.” Dvorak further notes that ancient Babylonians could predict its onset within a few hours, the Greeks within 30 minutes. “And today’s astronomers can pin down eclipses to within a second.”