It's still nonsense. Paranoid fantasy that cloning somehow makes people lesser. Star Wars engages in some of that with the clone troopers, too. I'm not sure if it is because they're trying to make their audience scared of cloning, if they themselves are scared of it, or both, but they really need to stop. Cloning is no more likely to create defects or monsters than a mother having identical twins is.
Is there any scientific basis for this opinion? As far as I know, we haven't cloned a human being yet and attempts at cloning 'lesser' mammals have turned out less than perfect.
If you're referring to Dolly, I know there was mass media coverage that she died early due to being a clone, but:
"A post-mortem examination showed she had a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte, which is a fairly common disease of sheep and is caused by the retrovirus JSRV. Roslin Institute scientists stated that they did not think there was a connection with Dolly being a clone, and that other sheep in the same flock had died of the same disease. Such lung diseases are a particular danger for sheep kept indoors, and Dolly had to sleep inside for security reasons.
Some in the press speculated that a contributing factor to Dolly's death was that she could have been born with a genetic age of six years, the same age as the sheep from which she was cloned. One basis for this idea was the finding that Dolly's telomeres were short, which is typically a result of the ageing process. The Roslin Institute have stated that intensive health screening did not reveal any abnormalities in Dolly that could have come from advanced aging."
But even if there
does turn out to be any truth that clones are born "genetically old" because of the telomeres*, obviously the people on this colony had either resolved this problem (telomere transplants?) or they were using samples from the original stock for their source material to clone from, because they weren't all geriatric 30 year olds or anything, they were fine aside from running out of viable source material (for whatever reason).
*They've cloned a very small number to use as a scientific sample so far, and as with Dolly, they may be dying young because the scientists at Roslin are good at genetics and not necessarily good at animal husbandry.
Also, I think we're doing it wrong so far - at least with the reported procedures. When an embryo splits "naturally" in a mother to form identical twins, those cells are still undifferentiated stem cells. Dolly was cloned using the nucleus of a skin cell from the donor animal. I admittedly can't find documentation to back this up at the moment, but I feel confident that their results would be better if they used stem cells. And I feel next to positive that they could create additional "twins" right now (if they haven't already) by using a variety of known methods to safely split the embryo - there's just not as many advantages to doing this rather than doing it to a grown organism, because part of the whole point is to be able to clone a prize racehorse or meat animals that grow particularly fast and with the best meat. Outcomes that can't be known until the animal is obviously well beyond being an embryo. (Although.... perhaps if you split the embryos on a large number of animals of a particular type, froze one of the embryos for each, and then waited to see the outcomes for the ones you didn't freeze, you could still achieve an advantage.)
I'll admit that I perhaps overstated my opinion in my last post slightly, but I'm just soooo sick of the "cloning is bad", "all GMOs are evil", "Dr. Frankenstein is going to kill all of us", etc, ignorant mess that I'm hearing so much of lately.
