Human Cloning

Hey, True Weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards, and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category, and that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks! Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

This episode continues the story we told in the True Weird Stuff episode called The Messenger. Now, you might want to listen to that one first. It's about the Raelian movement. That's the world's largest UFO religion. They don't believe in God or an afterlife. They believe humanity is one giant genetic experiment done by a super advanced race of extraterrestrials called the Elohim.

Does that name sound familiar? Yeah, those are the very same Elohim mentioned in the Bible. Raelians believe that immortality can only happen through human cloning, which is what this episode is about. So here goes, and thanks for listening. In November 1969, Science Digest ran a special section on cloning, and it's made very plain in the article that by 1975, we could be mass producing this creature called man for cloning.

In case you're wondering what that is, it's actually the reproduction of life without sex. How adorable are the people of the past? Oh my God, all their hopeful optimism, their starry eyed faith in the future, flying cars, robotic maids, human cloning, throwing an end to all wars and poverty. You can just eat those dreamers up with a spoon.

But 1975 came and went with no human cloning. Now, they did invent the digital camera that year, so it wasn't a total bust. And then something shocking happened. Fast forward to 1996 and the birth of a very special sheep named Dolly. If you can clone a sheep, and they did, can you clone a person? And if you could, does that mean you should?

Bill Clinton was in the White House when Dolly the cloned sheep was revealed to the world. Each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science. I believe we must respect this profound gift and resist the temptation to replicate ourselves. I know that some of y'all hate Bill Clinton so much that you'd argue if the man told you that fire was hotter, that water was wet.

But really, spend just five minutes thinking about all of the implications of cloning a human being, and you'll see why we don't. Why we probably shouldn't. Not ever. Not even if the technology to do it was available at Costco. Human cloning is like a Russian nesting doll of ethical landmines nestled into unthinkable horrors.

Of course, the rules are different if you happen to be like the king of your own religion, a self-declared prophet, a man who says all of humanity was one giant, forbidden, extraterrestrial experiment that got a bit out of hand. That there's no God and that cloning is the only path our species has to any kind of immortality.

Human cloning will make it possible for us to reach eternal life. It is the right of the people who want to enjoy the fruit of scientific progress, including human cloning and eternal life, to benefit from it. If religion and superstition, which are the same, had power over science, we would still be living in the Dark Age.

We Raelians believe that science should be our religion, as science saves lives while religion and superstition kill. Science destroys superstition and supernatural belief. That's why religion was always an enemy of science and progress, and is again trying to stop science at its best. It should be the freedom of the people to decide if they want to benefit or not from human cloning.

Legalizing human cloning is protecting the right of the unreborn. Stop. You probably won't ever need this fun fact, not even when you're watching Jeopardy, but the embryo of a sea urchin has only two cells. It's a painfully simple creature. So back in 1885, a German biologist named Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, a man fascinated by reproduction and embryology, set out to perform a little experiment.

His theory was that splitting the embryo would result in each half developing into half of the complete animal. Instead, to his amazement, he discovered that giving the sea urchin embryo just a little shake split the embryo in two and resulted in two sea urchins, both whole and complete. This doesn't seem like news to us knowing as we do that when an embryo splits, you get twins or triplets or whatever, not just a torso or just a head or just a pair of legs.

That would be a crazy Frankenstein situation, especially for parents of multiples. So we have one more experiment for you from back in the day. We wouldn't have IVF or gene editing technology like CRISPR without these early scientific adventures. In 1902, Hans Spemann, also obsessed with experimental embryology, settled down at his microscope to see if he might artificially engineer twins in a vertebrate, you know, something a bit more complex than a sea urchin.

Spemann went with the salamander. He retrieved a salamander embryo and using a teeny tiny noose that he made out of a strand of baby hair, carefully, carefully tightened it until the embryo split. Success! Each of those split cells grew into an adult salamander. Spemann was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935, not just for this scientific breakthrough, but for also having the patience to make a noose out of baby hair. I mean, the man deserved a trophy for that achievement alone.

So much painstaking work led up to the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep. What made her so different, so special, wasn't just that she thrived. The cell that had been used to clone her came from an adult sheep. It was the first time a mammal had been cloned from an adult cell. Okay, so here's the great big deal about that. The nucleus of every cell contains within it a complete genetic blueprint. In embryonic cells, any and every gene stands ready to activate. But in adult cells, that's another story. Adult cells go ahead and shut down whatever they don't need for their specific function, which means that if you want to use an adult cell for cloning, you must somehow reset that genetic blueprint info. Get it back to its embryonic factory setting, so to speak. Scientists admit that the process that resets those cells is unknown at this time, and that's unsettling. All of this is so much harder than lassoing salamander cells with a baby hair. And if the process is incomplete or messed up in any way, the embryos won't develop. This is one crazy and insanely unreasonably difficult task. A lot of us can't even get an unfamiliar TV remote to work, right? So now try getting an adult mammal cell back to its original embryo settings, okay? It's so hard. This one fact is the one to remember as we watch the whole world fall for a human cloning hoax perpetrated by the leader of Earth's foremost UFO religion and his devoted second-in-command. I'm very, very pleased to know that the first baby clone is born. She was born yesterday at 11.55 a.m. in the country where she was born. So this will not give you more details about the location. She's fine. We call her Eve between us. You knew that, of course. Some suggested it, and I thought it was a good idea, actually. You won't have the right name. And, you know, for a long time, I thought that this press conference will be with the baby, the parents, the scientists, everybody surrounding me and having pleasure announcing it. I'm alone. And there is a reason to that, is that it hasn't been easy to face the world with this announcement. And we have been discussing with the parents the last three months how we would handle today. And they decided not to show up yet.

They will. I hope they will. And I wish them well. We started really to work with human eggs in January of this year. So it took us three months to finalize. And this is very short, and that's why I said, is it luck or is it hard work? I do believe it's hard work. But we had our really good success very quickly and refined the technique for human eggs until spring, where we started to have implantation. We had 10 implantations, and five of them during the first three weeks were terminated spontaneously. Five others were successful and are still successful.

The first one was born yesterday. The next one is due in Europe next week. That's Bridget Busselier. She's a research chemist and a member of the international Raelian movement. Raelism is a UFO religion that believes that humanity was created as a genetic experiment by a race of extraterrestrials called the Elohim. Raelians do not believe in God or the concept of a mortal soul. They don't believe in an afterlife nor in reincarnation. The Raelian cosmology instead teaches that the entire cycle of the universe is one of creation, that just as humans were created by the Elohim, the Elohim were created by a race older and more advanced than themselves. And the story goes that eventually humans, if we don't bomb ourselves into extinction, humans will have the capacity to leave our home planet and create life elsewhere.

Raelians believe that human DNA is being tracked and recorded by the Elohim using their incredible supercomputing technology. The most worthy humans will then be selected by the Elohim to be made immortal through cloning. Cloning then is a foundational belief in Raelism according to Claude Vorilhon, aka Rael, the founder of Raelism and the Elohim's 40th and final earthly prophet. I was speaking about cloning from 27 years ago. It's a long time.

When I was talking in my public speech 27 years ago about we will soon clone human beings, everybody was laughing. Then came Dolly the sheep and now nobody is laughing anymore. Everybody is afraid and we are laughing. In 1997, Rael founded a company called Clonaid and persuaded Boisselier to come aboard as CEO. The company's very existence triggered a global uproar. Bioethicists were horrified. Human cloning wasn't exactly regulated. It was illegal in the UK and other European countries. But in the US, the only law around cloning was one that banned the of federal funds. Leave it to the private sector to regulate was the thought.

Because that always works out super well. So the two knew each other very, very well. Boisselier was not just a devout Raelian. She'd also served in Rael's order of angels. His elite harem of women groomed to have sex with the Elohim when they returned to earth and also with Rael if he so desired. Boisselier's own daughter also eventually signed up to be a surrogate mother for the religion's cloning program. Boisselier became a kind of celebrity in the year 2000 when Clonaid announced that it had received a significant donation to clone a human child. The resulting frenzy over that bombshell led to both Boisselier and Rael appearing before Congress, which if you watched the proceedings, obviously thrilled both of them. They'd been called kooks and now here they were testifying to Congress. Talk about instant global credibility. Late the next year in 2001, Boisselier announced that a cloned child had been born. A girl. They called her Eve. Boisselier hit the TV circuit. She talked about who might be in the market for a cloned child. I would say half and half. Half of them would like to clone themselves because that's the only way to have a baby. The other half are concerned by a dead child. Did she have any concerns about the ethics of cloning a human child? All the philosophical aspects and all the concerns people have. I'm very clear with that because I do believe that I'm not harming anybody with this.

And I think this could be a very beneficial for humanity. Boisselier described Clonaid's first candidate to 60 Minutes Australia. This baby died about two years ago and they had the chance to before the death so we were able to to get sampling that are useful and so we have to have this baby as the first clone baby. Clonaid would not release the identity of the parents who were clearly prepared to pay any price. In this case about two hundred thousand dollars.

I think inside of them they want to come see the child again and go back to zero with that set of genes. Then came December 26 2002 and the announcement at a press conference in a Florida Holiday Inn that Eve, Clonaid's first successful human clone, had been born. On January 3rd 2003 the company announced that Eve may have been the first but the three more clones were due to be born very soon which would have been a success rate as astonishing as anything in science fiction if it proved to be true. A very big if. Why so cynical? Why immediately suspect Brigitte Boisselier and the Raelians of lying? What kind of people would fabricate a tale like this and try to fool the whole world? It had to be true. They'd get caught in lies sooner or later and then what? That's a good question. Here's why Boisselier's announcement was met with so much skepticism. Cloning a person is not at all comparable to cloning a sheep. No disrespect to Dolly, just the technical difficulties involved are staggering. Identical twins are natural clones the result of one fertilized egg splitting into two embryos. Identical twins share nearly identical genes with each other but not with either parent. Natural clones because that egg split on its own not because some German scientist poked at it with a wee noose made of baby hair.

Reproductive cloning begins with a mature somatic cell from the donor animal or person I guess. Somatic cells are those not involved in reproduction like skin, muscle, bone cells are all somatic cells. Then you'll need an egg cell one that's had all of the DNA in its own nucleus removed. Then you can either transfer the DNA via needle that's in the somatic cell to the now empty egg cell or you can use an electrical current to zap both fusing that somatic cell to the egg cell. Drop the finished product into a test tube where it hopefully develops into an embryo. Then that embryo is implanted into the womb of an adult female animal or person I guess. This is basically the recipe for getting Dolly the sheep.

It gets even more challenging when you're working with humans or other primates. This is about to get a tiny bit technical. See primate eggs have two proteins that are critical for cell division. They're called spindle proteins and they're snuggled right up against the chromosomes in primate eggs. Suck out the nucleus of a primate egg to make way for a donor nucleus and you're also sucking out the spindle proteins and that's a problem for cell division.

Mice, rabbits, cats, so much easier to clone since their spindle proteins are conveniently more spread out. Then primate eggs are fragile, so easily damaged by the whole process, the dyes, the ultraviolet light. Scottish researchers use the nucleus from a cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old sheep to clone Dolly. How many tries did it take before they succeeded? Oh girl, you're not even close. Tried 277 attempts with only one success and you know what that means? It means 276 other sheep didn't make it. Still, Dolly was a success and other successes followed. A couple years after Dolly made her debut, a Japanese team managed to clone eight calves from one cow. Four of those calves died. Are you starting to see the problem in cloning humans? Many people aren't troubled by 276 dead sheep and four dead calves, but now make it a few hundred or even a few thousand dead human babies. Now what?

This is where the controversy comes in. There are actually three types of cloning, gene cloning, therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning. It's that last one that gets all the play in sci-fi. Gene cloning, that's the process of making multiple identical copies of a gene for research purposes. That's where insulin comes from, by the way. Did you know that you can insert it into a bacteria like E. coli, for example, to produce a life-saving medication for people with diabetes? How cool is that? Then there's therapeutic cloning. Okay, but now we're kicking the hornet's nest. You may have never heard the phrase therapeutic cloning, but I bet you've heard the words stem cells. So in a nutshell, this kind of cloning starts out just like reproductive, just like Dolly the sheep. You have an unfertilized egg and a donor egg. Swap out the nucleus in the unfertilized egg with the nucleus from the donor egg. The resulting embryonic stem cells are genetically identical to the donor, and the vision for therapeutic cloning was truly grand. Use those cells for research, to treat people with otherwise untreatable conditions, even to grow organs for transplant. But these embryonic cells, they're human. The ethical and moral storm this news kicked off. People were outraged.

You can't create and then sacrifice human embryos for the benefit of other humans. Might this lead to some dystopian future society where those with means can breed all the embryos they want? Treating those test tubes like a set of emergency spare parts? You sure can see that happening. If the whole idea gives you the willies, then definitely read the book, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, or watch the movie. Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan play young clones who were commissioned as spare parts for their wealthy originals. In this world, all the rich people have a clone, and these clones are slowly picked apart until their bodies can no longer survive. Eyes, kidneys, limbs, whatever the original needs, the clone exists to supply it.

In the story, they're considered soulless, just sentient meat with no value or purpose beyond what parts can be taken from them. Now that's cloning taken to the extreme. But the extremes are always. Look at the biggest headlines. A whole lot of Americans got lost their minds at the very idea of stem cell research, much less stem cell therapies.

There aren't any federal laws that outright ban stem cell research in the United States, but there are loads of restrictions. It's illegal to use federal funding to derive stem cells from embryos. If you can lay hands on stem cells that don't involve a human embryo and definitely don't require the destruction of a human embryo, then you're in the clear. That law is called the Dickie Wicker Amendment. The fights over stem cell research go back decades. In 2001, President George W. Bush allowed federal funding to support research on a limited number of embryonic stem cell that already existed. In 2009, President Obama expanded the policy to research on embryonic stem cell lines where the embryos were originally created for reproductive purposes and then donated by the people whose fertility treatment caused the embryos to be created. And this is the moment right now where we shout out a remarkable woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black woman who died in 1951, but whose cancer cells were the very first to become immortalized, meaning Henrietta's cancer cells can reproduce indefinitely and forever, provided the conditions are right.

This line of cells is called HeLa and is one of our most valuable medical resources. Henrietta wasn't informed, nor was she or her family ever compensated. In fact, the Lacks didn't even know of Henrietta's contribution to medical science until 24 years after her death. Like you wouldn't be shocked, maybe even outraged to learn this news about one of your family members. But back to being able to donate frozen embryos. This was met with hostility by some, but it took until February 2024 for the argument over whether or not a frozen embryo enjoyed the rights of personhood to be turned into a state law in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court ruled that embryos are children, with all the rights granted to children in these here United States.

Given how costly and overwhelming fertility treatment can be, here's hoping that parents in Alabama can at least claim their frozen embryos as dependents on their taxes. But while the talking heads were ranting about people throwing their frozen babies into the trash, here's what they didn't tell you. It all begins with a zygote. That's what's created when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg. Zygotes are rejected in assisted reproduction when fertilized incorrectly.

Like, for example, when an egg is fertilized by two sperm. That, as it turns out, is a pretty common occurrence. Double sperm means the wrong number of chromosomes and a failure of normal development. Not viable. But what if everything goes as planned and you end up with an embryo? Maybe even lots of embryos. So you freeze them. And one day, maybe you decide to donate those frozen embryos. Extraordinary generosity. And you don't need to worry that your frozen embryo will end up in some weird cloning experiment because most of those embryo are frozen in the blastosis stage. And that's way too late to be transferring the DNA. It's so complicated, isn't it? In the bottom line, it's not technically impossible to clone a human. It's just really, really difficult.

Researchers have learned that you can't do it with donor animal eggs and human eggs aren't exactly falling from the sky for cloning experiments. In fact, human eggs are all but non-existent for this purpose. Animal eggs. Remember that mysterious unknown process that somehow reboots the donor cell to its embryonic settings? Well, it turns out that animal eggs don't do that or can't do that. At least not with human DNA. Fascinating. Especially when you consider how close we are genetically to so many living things. As in, humans have 98.8% similarity with chimps, 94% with dogs, 90% with cats, 80% with cows. What an epic mystery.

Now, the fact that human DNA and animal eggs are fundamentally incompatible hasn't stopped people from trying to create hybrid clones. Chinese scientists were reportedly the first to successfully create human-animal embryos. In 2003, a team at the Shanghai Second Medical University fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before being destroyed to harvest their stem cells. Later that same year, a U.S. scientist, Panayotis Zavos, announced he had created human-cow embryos that lived for around two weeks and could theoretically have been implanted into a woman's womb. A human-rabbit hybrid? A human-cow hybrid? Sounds like the plot of a bad horror movie. Not a thing that seems even remotely possible. Yet, nature pushing back against our aggressive curiosity. I'll give you the sheet, says nature. Some cows, some mice, rabbits, reptiles, even dogs and cats. But people, no. At least, not yet. When you look at Dolly, the sheet, all you see is just a regular sheet.

And the same is true when you look at a cloned mouse or rabbit. You'd never be able to tell the difference between the cloned animal and the non-cloned animal, but it turns out that clones are different in some weird and mysterious and ultimately not great ways. Cloned animals are bigger at birth. Who knows why? Cloned animals often have defects in vital organs, their hearts, brains, and livers. Cloned animals are prone to problems with their immune systems and most noticeable, premature aging. Poor Dolly, the sheet, only lived till age six, half the lifespan of the average sheep. And the reason why is also kind of the plot of a horror movie. It'll make you think twice about cloning anyone you love, including your pet.

Chromosomes, DNA, the one thing you need to make a clone. Well, the tip of a chromosome is called a telomere. Over the course of time, these telomeres shrink. And also telomere length can vary from chromosome to chromosome and between species. And that shrinkage can be impacted by lifestyle factors. Stress is a huge factor in shortening telomeres. And if while your mother was pregnant with you, she experienced stressful events, you may have been born with already shortened telomeres. And we're not talking earthquake and famine. Exposure to pollution in the womb can shorten your telomeres. And you know why you don't want that? Why you want your telomeres to be nice and long? Because you don't want diseases related to aging. And you don't want a higher risk of death. Back to Dolly, the sheep, dying at age six, when she ought to have lived till age 12. And she was one pampered animal. But the donor DNA used to clone Dolly, taken from another sheep that happened to be six years old. Maybe it's a coincidence that the math works out so neatly. Or maybe it's not. It's not nice to fool mother nature. People want it to Even the skeptics for all their outrage, you could see it on their faces, they want it to believe.

But even now, in the year 2025, we still can't clone a human being. Hell, at the rate we're rocketing backward with science literacy, I'm afraid we're going to lose the ability to make cough drops, nevermind people. What on earth made the people of the world believe that the I'm very, very pleased to know that the first baby cone is born.

Well, one giant reason might be that genetics is just bewildering to most of us. And who even knows anything about cloning? It's really complex. It's really hard. Raelle took advantage of that blissful ignorance, and of the media, which is always foaming at the mouth for controversy and conflict. People might not watch a news story about zoning laws in their own county, but a cloned baby named Eve born to grieving parents. Yeah, now that's story.

That's how you get people's attention. And if Raelle was the master of anything, it was attracting attention. On New Year's Day 2001, Raelle published a book called Yes to Human Cloning, Eternal Life Thanks to Science. In the book, Raelle describes experiencing cloning himself while visiting the Elohim on their home planet back in 1975. A reading from the book of Raelle. A technology called accelerated growth process will clone a people directly into adulthood. They will immediately become the equivalent of between 15 and 17 physical years old. These clones are just physical copies, like computer hardware or virgin cassettes. They will have no memory or personality. Okay, whoa. Let's sit with that for a second. You're looking at your teenage self, fully alive, yet completely blank.

It's so creepy. Very Twilight Zone black mirror. But wait, there's more. I saw the Elohim insert a cell into my forehead into a huge aquarium like machine and then watched a perfect copy of myself grow in just a few seconds. Yep, creepy. So now that we have the perfect teenage replica of the Raelle, now what? A technology is already in progress in Japan that will allow us to download human memory and personality into a computer. In cloning, our personality and memory is transferred into the young body that we just cloned from ourselves. Oh, is that how that works?

It's just a matter of inserting the software into the hardware and then we wake up in a young body with all the memory and personality intact, ready to live another cycle of life. This process can be repeated indefinitely, moving from one clone body of ourselves to another clone body. This is how the Elohim live forever. This is why cloning is the key to eternal life. And then I guess we just kick the discarded husk of our former body into the fire and forget about it. So the Raellians through their shell company, Clonaid, announced to the world on December 28, 2002, that that very first cloned human had been born, allegedly cloned from her 31 year old American mother.

Clonaid CEO Brigitte Boisselier said that the birth had taken place at an undisclosed location overseas, which she then later said was Israel. Clonaid retained a former science editor for ABC News named Michael Guillen to oversee independent tests to confirm that Eve was the product of cloning. But the testing was halted before it began. It was thought that Eve's parents withdrew the permission upon learning that the state of Florida was calling for their baby to be placed under court protection. Golan then declared that his team had not been given access. He basically acknowledged that the whole thing might be a hoax to bring publicity to the Raellian cause.

It took literally one day for the Bush administration to pounce on Clonaid. The FDA opened an investigation. A lawyer in Florida named Bernard Siegel immediately followed a petition seeking guardianship for baby Eve. Where was the child? Were her needs being met? Who was her advocate? The judge tossed the case out. But by that point, Clonaid claimed that two more clones had been born, one in Japan and one in the Netherlands. But again, as with baby Eve, there was no proof. Nothing other than the word of Brigitte Boisselier and the assurance of the most holy and beloved prophet of the Elohim, Rael.

And that's where it stands today. Clonaid insisting that the company had successfully cloned multiple human beings, but offering zero evidence to back it up. Probably because there is no evidence and there never was even one successful clone. Why? Well, because now you know how insanely complicated it would be to clone a human. How many failed and non-viable embryos would have to be destroyed? How many implantations would end in miscarriage?

Do you really believe that it's likely that a company running out of a post office box in the When that lawyer in Florida investigated Clonaid, he learned that the company's vice president lived in Vegas and struggled to get a call returned by his boss, Brigitte Boisselier, who, by the way, announced that the company was now building something called a Babytron, an artificial womb that would remove human women from the process altogether. A Babytron. The only thing missing here is Dr. Evil. I mean, come on. This went down in 2003. How did anyone buy it? Are we that godawful stupid? How depressing. But for Rael and his acolytes, what does the truth matter?

Their faith is what matters. Raellians aren't troubled by human skepticism. They believe the They believe the prophet Rael, who rewarded Brigitte Boisselier by making her his second in command. She ended up leaving Clonaid and moving to Los Angeles, where she started an organization called Clitoraid, also affiliated with Raellism. Believe me, what you're about to hear is real.

Clitoraid raises funds to provide restorative surgery to women who have been victims of genital mutilation. The group is working to build a hospital in Burkina Faso where women can receive reconstructive surgery. It's a serious public health issue and an important one to address. That said, Rael sure has the gift of making stuff weird. My answer is very simple. You have thousands of organizations in the world, religious and non-religious, collecting, raising money to help. And that's great, and that's beautiful. But to help African women to get their clitoris back? No. Zero. Only one? Clitoraid. And I'm very proud to have founded this organization. And I understand that most of the charitable organizations are Christian and Catholic. So of course they are ready to, and it's beautiful, to collect money to help the starving children of Africa. Wonderful. But they will never move one finger, even the little one, to help the sexuality of African women because they are against pleasure, against sexual pleasure especially. So nobody will ever move a finger among the Christian communities to help African women to have their orgasm back. And the only one who can do it, of course, is a philosophy which is in favor, which supports fanatically the right to pleasure and orgasm, the Ryan Movement. So when I saw that the new technology was available and that on the other side you had these poor African women which couldn't make enough money to pay for the very little amount of $500 which is two years of salary for an African woman, I said, clitoride. And it's beautiful to give back the right to orgasm and pleasure to African women.

It's a fundamental right. What is the meaning of life, like Monty Python said, if it's just to survive without pleasure? And that's what the Christian people are against, they're against pleasure. But the Creator, the Elohim, what the Christian people call God, created us to have pleasure. And if possible, sexual pleasure and orgasms. It's part of life. It's beautiful. You can have religious orgasm. You can have an orgasm like a prayer. And that's why it's so important, a fundamental right of African women to have orgasm. And if not, what is the meaning of life?

Just to survive like a microbe, like a bacteria. And I think bacteria have some kind of sexual pleasure also. So pleasure is everywhere, especially now in the spring, it's everywhere. And it's, I think, a duty to African women to give them back their sexuality and orgasm. Food, you know, many African women have enough food, but they don't have any more orgasm because millions of them who have enough food, they don't have a clitoris. So thanks to this wonderful doctor who created this technology, we can give them back pleasure. And that's what clitoride is about.

Wow. Until 2035, or such glorious time as the Elohim return and give us all blank slate teenage clones of ourselves to play with. I guess we'll have to be content with cloning our pets. Barbara Streisand already has. So has Paris Hilton. At $50,000 per clone, it's not cheap. And getting an exact genetic replica of your beloved dog doesn't mean getting your beloved dog back from the grave. DNA might be who we are, but it's not all of who we are. Environment and experience shape us and change us. Our DNA sequence might stay the same. But the way the genes are expressed or suppressed has a lot to do with the world around us. It's called epigenetics.

Miraculous little creatures like we are just can't be turned into exact copies. Which is why we might want to be thankful that we can't clone people. It's a nightmare worthy of Stephen King to imagine bringing your beloved back as a clone. Every physical detail right there, right down to that dimple, that cowlick, those freckles. Only to watch your beloved become someone you don't recognize, and maybe don't like. A stranger in an all too familiar package.

Today, Rael lives in Japan, runs a YouTube page called Rael Academy, continues to preach the message of the coming return of the Elohim. He's also taken on a new cause, and is behind an organization in the United States called Go Topless. They fight for the constitutional right of American women to enjoy being topless in public with the same freedom as men. No word on where the Elohim come down on freeing the nipple. Not that Rael troubles himself with anything that petty. Not with intellectualization. When we intellectualize, we became sensuality with love. Not with intellectualization. And a beautiful life with sensuality with love. Not with intellectualization. When we intellectualize, we became violent, we hate the people who are different, we become racist, sexist, macho. When we don't intellectualize, we just feel living life all around us. And that's what's important. That's all, because I don't want to give a full seminar right now. I love you, and thank you for being here with me.

Harmony Let Harmony ring in your symphony Infinite Let Infinite envelop its melody Let it pass Let it pass Forget all of your sorrows that break Let it pass Let it pass Put a detouje Next time on True Weird Stuff Hey Does something look kind of I don't know, off? About that dummy, that mannequin? Look, the one that's dressed like a cowboy Just Doesn't it look so real?

Like they just propped up a dead body? I mean, nobody would ever do that, right? Right? Right? The outlaw corpse On the next True Weird Stuff The only way you have to follow is the truth The only way you have to follow is the truth Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode Kary "Doc" Bowser Heather Elizabeth, and Don Morgan So Sherry, I can remember when I was in high school biology, maybe that we talked about cloning and I can remember that the teacher that I had or this may have been freshman year in college I can remember the professor I had said in cloning, it's not just the material you're working with it's the idea that you have to recreate the exact same conditions from a temperature standpoint and I think you mentioned this ultraviolet light and some other stuff in order to get it exact so it's not just a matter of you have something over here and you bring it over here and voila, you have a clone it's so much more complicated than that and when you were saying so many of the clones had all kinds of physical difficulties and whatnot I was reminded of the movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton Do you remember that movie?

You know what? I do So when you were talking about this because not all of his versions of him were okay some were really stupid some were really clumsy none of them were exactly the same so leave it to me to take a scientific comment and take it to a Michael Keaton comedy but I was thinking about that because this really is fascinating and I remember when this Dolly the Sheep came out and it was a big deal people were upset because you were playing God there are so many levels to this we'll come back to the physical difficulty of it but you kind of are playing God in a way and I will remind you okay so let me try to stay on track here one of the things that was not known when the announcement of Dolly the Sheep came out they didn't know that Dolly's lifespan would be half of what it should be because you don't know when something's alive you don't know when it's going to die well don't you find it interesting that Dolly was cloned from a 6 year old animal and died at 6 years old when her life should have lasted 12 that's some pretty handy math isn't it?

that's the telomeres on the end of your chromosomes the issue with Dolly and with playing God by making Dolly because I do remember this was fascinating to me I do remember the controversy around this and a lot of it a lot of it was based on feelings and vibes not on facts but it turns out that the feelings and vibes kind of vibed with the facts the feeling of facts like we can't be making things we can't be making animals and people we can't be playing God like that we don't really know what we're doing something's going to go terribly wrong and for the most part in cloning things go terribly wrong every single time you have to have a strong stomach to destroy hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of versions before you get to the one you keep and any endeavor that would be cloning humans I promise you whoever is in that laboratory is destroying non-viable human embryos or non-viable fetuses or non-viable infants they have to be destroyed and non-viable doesn't mean it's unattractive it means like it's lungs are fused or it's missing it's just terrible right it's terrible and we just had a case in Montana where a rancher was caught cloning bighorn sheep and he got arrested he was only sentenced to 6 months in prison I remember this this just happened but you know we can't have cloned animals all of whom seem to have some stuff jacked up we can't introduce cloned animals into the natural population of that species can you guess why?

I mean can you freaking guess why? because we can't have animals in the natural population cross breeding with cloned animals that have significant defects or damage or mutations does anybody not see how that's a problem? like hello? so the human cloning thing and when the Raelians said they had cloned the baby Eve so they made the announcement at the end of 2002 and then they did the press conference at literally the Holiday Inn like near Miami in 2003, it was very rinky dink but they couldn't have been more delighted because even though it was all BS they got to testify in front of Congress and we got to do what we do best in the American governmental system, we got to shake our fists and pontificate and do sound bites for the local news while not actually doing a damn thing that's what we did but they got global publicity and instant overnight credibility for their cloning operation which was a post office box in the that was pretty much the extent of clone aid, they had like a rented space with a microscope but the kind of the kind of technology and environment that you would need to clone a rabbit wasn't in play for clone aid but Rael and Brigitte Bossoyer were masters, they would have been good Vegas magicians, they were masters at distraction and sleight of hand and they had the world convinced that they had somehow done this unimaginably difficult thing and the conversation and they testified to Congress and this was on the news and 60 Minutes and all the conversation was these are grieving parents and they don't want to have another baby they want the baby they lost, they want the child they lost and why shouldn't they have that and I'm not going to answer why they should or shouldn't have it, I'm just going to tell you right now they can't have it, it's not freaking possible it's not and it's in part because of what my friend Uncle Sparkles called the built in kill switch primate eggs alone have that double protein spindle bracketed bracketing either side of the chromosome and as soon as you suck it out you break the spindles and you break the material the material the nucleus of the egg so it's almost like we're not meant to clone higher orders you know the primates and humans so that's interesting all by itself that primates alone would have that double spindle and I didn't know that, that was something I learned when we were doing this episode so there's that and then there's the whole problem of epigenetics and the environment I can't clone you Max because in order to get two of you I need you to get raised by Fran and Frank and I need you to have your brother and sister on either side of you and I need you to be clumsy and I need you to have raffles the cat and I need you I need you to make every decision and choice I'm going to need you to be clumsy I'm going to need you to be clumsy as a child I'm going to need your parents to mistake what you need and give you orthopedic shoes instead thinking that'll fix it, I need all of those things to happen and I can't have any of them because your parents are gone that world that we raised you in was gone so I can get something that looks like you, has a lot of your mannerisms because let's face it we're very much you see this with twins that were separated at birth and adopted into different families when they bring them back together how wildly similar they are do you remember the documentary Three Perfect Strangers? Oh yeah. Right?

So I can get really close to two maxes but I'll never ever be able to have the max I love again through a clone and that is something I think that we that we didn't necessarily really understand the way we do now. So given this guy's penchant for sex how convenient for him that we're getting clones that are 15 to 17 years old that we're going to download stuff into I mean it's just there's always this really perverted twist with this guy no matter what it is that we do with this just like yeah we're doing cleaning and all by the way and then there's always something that is very unsettling the weird twist yeah go ahead say what you're going to say well let's go with this craziness right that we don't know maybe it's true we're just like being fools the third eye is your forehead if you listen to the episode the message the messenger that's where the chakra the third eye or whatever is that's where they go and get the cell that they're going to clone you from they put it in the machine and in minutes there's 15 year old you but there's no animating spark of life it's breathing it's hard as beating but it has no memories no identity it's just a meat suit it's an empty blank brain and then we're going to download your consciousness and experience into that blank version of yourself so you'll have your 15 year old body but let's say you're 45 15 year old body but your 45 year old memories and so on and so on so pretty soon we have 15 year old bodies walking around with thousands of years worth of memories and lived experiences this is what I mean when I say don't look too closely or you won't be able to keep believing you have to you got to keep the story at a slight distance so that you can still believe it that's weird that's weird and you know I love the fact that this guy Rael is an activist that he's really going for something of real need and that is for women to go topless oh my god if I had a nickel for every time I shaken my fist at the heavens and went I'll tell you what would fix this is if I could go outside topless Sherry but let me tell you as activism goes finally there's something I can get behind so you know I've been looking for a purpose in my life Sherry a cause something I get behind here it is so remember the part of the episode where we talked about the human rabbit and human cow hybrids in Japan yes and I wanted to talk about that but go ahead so when that story first leaked we talked about it on our radio show yes we have a feature if you've never listened to our radio show we have a feature called can you believe this and I was like he's half man half rabbit and there's actually a cryptid somewhere out there I forget the name of the bunny man cryptid you know what I'm talking about you guys do you not find it monstrous that they did hybrid human rabbit hybrid human cow clones is anyone not troubled by that

all I can think of is the movie the fly with Jeff Goldblum you know that's the only thing that I can think of I mean girl I love science obviously but you know we have to temper innovation and curiosity with ethics and and thankfully you know those human rabbit human cow clone hybrids that they made don't like don't let your imagination run wild it was not like a human baby with whiskers and big ears you know these are clumps of cells these are not like they got it to the point where they could implant it into a human female and she could carry in theory carry the pregnancy to term and potentially give birth to a human cow hybrid or what have you although the chances of that pregnancy going to term and producing a living being are pretty slim because one of the problems they have in cloning in animal cloning full stop is the high rate of miscarriage where the pregnancy is just not viable and the pregnancy spontaneously ends so even if they did do the wildly unethical thing of planning a human cow hybrid into a woman's uterus I mean the chances of it going the distance are small it's really unsettling though isn't it on the one hand when you said Mojo the miniature schnauzer is 90% the same as me I went or 94% whatever it was I went well that's kind of cool but when you think about the monstrous science fiction movie this is it's really really unsettling and this woman Bridget Wassilye I'm sorry I really don't care if I pronounce it incorrectly what's she gonna do come after me she's she's got like two PhDs because after we talked about this in the last episode I looked up a couple things but she's really smart she's really bright so then I guess I'm like why on earth would she end up hooking herself up with this half-baked bullshit religion because it's not a real religion I know we don't want to make fun of people's religious beliefs but this is I mean they're BSing their way through all of this stuff it's not just kooky it's just there's something about it there's a sinister element to it she I have an easier time understanding rank and file than I do understanding the leaders like Bridget Wassilye because I really do feel this is like life is so hard and overwhelming and scary and if you don't have a lot of like human connection and support community however you define it you can get really lonely and spin out and the people that are drawn to these kinds of movements or cults if you want to use that word they need something and they're vulnerable and these people prey upon them I think that Bridget Wassilye is more of an enigma than Raelle because like girl what's your motive you you trade it you trade it your brilliance

and your credibility and your legitimate scientific and academic career for what fame like is that what this was? was this about fame and attention and feeling important and special or just because you're book smart and IQ smart doesn't mean you're people smart or heart smart or was she also sucked into this and just came set all of her scientific knowledge and her education aside and said you know what I believe him I think this is real was she a true believer?

you know perhaps there's a lot of I don't know but there's so much murkiness around all of this religion I mean there really is and what his motives are I can't believe that as you said smart has nothing to do with it people there's a lot of really smart people that don't have any emotional intelligence or that's where I tell my sure I tell myself this because of what I do for a living so I can feel better about myself because really I have to do that I'm just I'm really mystified like you are as to what she gets out of this I feel like what she traded for this was not a good trade but then again those are my values I'm like girl look at you you had a really legitimate career you were a respected scientist you were a college professor what that wasn't enough but what do I know maybe it's a lot more fun flying around and testifying to congress and having everybody know your name and maybe what if she was a true believer and she's just like by god I'm going to be one of the cloned righteous when the Elohim return to earth and she was trained to be one of their buddies like she was part of that order of angels like just yeah so working on this episode and having this conversation was such an epiphany for me and it's too late for me I don't get a do over as a mom like when I was a kid my mom did not my mom taught me to read very very early like I could read before kindergarten not because I'm special but because my mom taught me to read before sending me to kindergarten and my mom was then and continues to be a big reader multiple books a week she never censored my reading I was if it was in the house I was allowed to read it and because we lived out in Wyoming in the middle of Bufu nowhere with no phone TV or radio I had plenty of time and so I picked up a paperback book that my mom had left lying around called Joshua Son of Nun and it's a real pulpy book like it's not some work of great literature what have you the cat just walked across my computer am I still here Max?

excellent we're running a very professional operation here too weirdos here's the premise you're going to want to read this Max it's so pulpy and fun so here's the premise of Joshua Son of Nun when John F. Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza in Dallas in 1963 doctors there preserved tissue samples and they cloned JFK with the hope of returning a Kennedy returning him to the White House and they didn't just clone JFK they did everything in their power to recreate the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's upbringing and his life and the clone which was really as I reflect on it was really forward thinking because this book I don't know when it was written because I read it when I was like nine and it was a battered paperback so it must have been out for a while this book was talking about epigenetics and environmental impacts before we were talking as a civilization about them right so the clone who they named Joshua instead of John has back problems just like JFK did he's got that shock of wavy hair and those twinkly blue eyes and he had Addison's too I believe yeah and this child this clone of JFK part of his journey in the story of the book is realizing that's who he is and of course some of the same nefarious actors that wanted JFK out of the picture are coming for Joshua so it's this super insane pulpy book about cloning so it's stuck in my head and I did not censor my children's reading and now I regret that because look how I turned out Max look how I turned out well I told the same story my parents didn't care what I was reading as long as I was reading and they you know I know that I've talked about it on the show and I think I've talked about it maybe on a couple episodes of the podcast but you know I think it had a lot to do with shaping lots of things in my life I mean I think I think we were in 7th grade and we read In Cold Blood which is the movie the book about the clutter murder and so I after that I was gone I went true crime weird stuff assassinations any of that sort of stuff that I could that I could read I was reading do you think we would have turned out better if we would have only been allowed to read like the Hardy Boys and stuff no because there's something there's an element to that that's not realistic I mean I think we had a better sense of what the world really was about by reading that kind of stuff well I will tell you that between Joshua Son of None and the book Audrey Rose my early obsessions with cloning and reincarnation were locked in so I look back and think I don't know maybe I would have been like more normal and I wouldn't make people nervous if I had stuck to Nancy Drew but anyway so who's going to be more interesting at a cocktail party the person that read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys or the person that read this stuff it's just hard because you'd be surprised how many conversations like you'll just be sitting talking with some people and people will be making conversation you'd be surprised how many times you want to go oh you want to hear about body snatching or cloning

I told somebody last week hey did you not see in your news a tweet about the army special forces soldier who just came clean he's been sitting for 10 years on a bombshell story about off world technology and other people are like yeah that wasn't in my news feed what the hell is in your news feed Susan what are you looking at anyway so the cloning thing and there are always people because it's super fun to put on your tin foil hat and daydream there are always people that are convinced will tell you to a certainty that there are laboratories in China where they are cloning people and I just am going to very politely push back on that I don't think even the Chinese laboratories filled with their brilliant Chinese scientists have gotten around the extreme difficulty of working with human X what do you think or am I just being like naive in the last episode you talked about the fact that they were selling these eggs on the internet which is not something I imagine I could get away with today because back when they were doing that that was that really was the wild west days of the internet yeah the railians had they had a little revenue stream coming in from donor donor eggs women in the because of course rail was very big on attracting young beautiful unworldly nubile women to the religion see I mean and like I've seen I've looked at stuff and I I'll stand by my assessment this guy needed to start a religion to get laid oh I'm with you on that I'm with you on that so I don't look we'll weigh in now right like what do we think I do not believe for one second that the railians cloned anything in the early 2000s no I don't believe that at all no no it's just unimaginable first of all you want to talk about half-assed let's be let's be real so half-assed in the Netflix documentary if you want to watch that about rail called the profit I haven't watched it yet no they talk to the guy who the scientist that was hired by clone aid to do this human cloning and that man like so many of the people that came through this call that man is shattered like he's not okay and he's telling you point blank didn't happen couldn't happen not possible total scam of course you know rail and Bridget was so yay maintained to this day that they were telling the truth but the alternative is to admit that they're schemers and liars so of course they're going to mean they're schemers and liars told the truth but yeah I don't think they I don't think they found any success I just don't think it's possible and I want to say this about genetics in my primitive baboon like way because I am not this is complicated stuff but I will say this something that we have learned and DNA our knowledge and understanding of DNA is very new I don't know if people realize how new that knowledge is right it's not even 100 years old okay so something that we're learning is that it's not linear when you like when you use the gene editing technology called CRISPR we are learning that everything is connected in ways that we simply do not understand and don't yet have the ability to map so maybe I can I can edit your

the genes in your embryo to make sure that it's a girl with blue eyes and height because you want an athlete you want you a basketball player so maybe I can manipulate those genes but here's what you don't know and what I don't know what nobody knows the gene that I manipulate to change her eye color it expresses in other ways connected to other parts of development and now maybe I gave her blue eyes but she's going to be born with a cleft palate for example maybe I was able to manipulate the genes for height but in doing so I accidentally created a situation where she has a significant defect in the walls of her heart and it sounds crazy like what would height have to do with that what would eye color have to do with that but that's what we're starting to learn that we're not meant to play God like this or Elohim or alien scientists like this because we don't understand we simply don't understand I have a little niece who has a rare genetic disorder called Angelman syndrome there are two variants of it one of them is a gene that you carry that can cause the disease that's one variant the other is what they call a maternal deletion meaning that two you're missing a chromosome where there should be a pair there's only one and that missing chromosome is enough to create Angelman syndrome which you know the children it's a seizure disorder aftereffect of electrical activity in the brain Angelman's kids are nonverbal they never sleep some of them are not really ambulatory it's extremely profoundly difficult right so in the case of my niece she's got the deletion her dad has both chromosomes has the pair her mom is missing one if they could wake up the sleeping thing in her dad the one that's asleep because of that pair one is turned on and expresses and the other one's asleep and in her mom one is turned on and the other one is missing that's the really simple way of thinking about it so they've been experimenting for years now can we wake up that gene and cure this maybe but what happens when we wake the gene up what else is expressed what else is the consequence if we're successful in doing that and that's the part we don't know and there are people doing like DIY home CRISPR or gene editing in their basement people are nutty so we don't know and that's I know right Max is like wait I thought the CRISPR is where the lettuce went now I have to do gene editing who knew that this had so much in common with my refrigerator so here's what the takeaway is for cloning we simply can't give you back peach is your beagle I definitely can't give you back your son or your grandma it is not possible even if even if I can somehow produce a viable embryo that grows into a fetus that is delivered and becomes a human child I can't give you back what you miss because it's freaking impossible to do it and that's even if we didn't have that weird double spindle protein kill switch in those primate and human eggs

so I don't believe I don't believe that the Raelians cloned people and I got to say I've heard some kooky things I've heard some very there are people that say how do you even believe a virgin birth okay that's fair you're allowed to challenge that folks do you really really believe that some aliens are going to take something out of your forehead and grow a 15 year old version of you and insert your memories into it do you believe that really do you believe that does that seem plausible to you and that's not even getting into in the last episode the messenger when we really went deep on the Elohim what did Rael tell us they're all very very feminine oh the least feminine Elohim is 90 times more feminine than the most feminine human and they free love and they're constantly having sex but they're not allowed to have babies so they're sterilized I can't even with the if this is a race of people that reproduce by cloning why do they even have reproductive organs okay why like none of it holds together none of it when you step back from it and if Rael was here he would he would smirk in that reptilian way and he would nod and he would say and that is the mystery of faith and now may I see your boobs no alright Max so that's my take I want to hear your take now I just do not buy it for a second Sherry I don't buy it for all of the reasons you just said I mean there is no way that you can look at this and just say that this is for real if you are if you are a person who is an atheist as he is this is a story that's been crafted to fit what he already believes you know and we learned that in the last episode of this yeah and I think it's very convenient there's a lot of things that are really convenient for him you know the fact that you're going to clone people they're going to be adults and they're going to be teenagers oh well some of them are guys but there's going to be teenage girls too because this guy has a penchant for loving you know younger women you know so I mean like I said before there's always that creepy sex part of this for this guy and as we learned in the last episode too his wife agreed yeah it was basically yeah I mean he might have believed it at one time but in the end this is really about sex listen if you want to know what the bottom line is on your life ask you know ask the first wife she'll give you the low down I have to say you know I've spent a lot of time with this man who looks like a cross between George Costanza from Seinfeld and like your best friend's creepy uncle that always wanted you to sit on his lap I mean like there's just something so wrong with this guy he invented a religion that very neatly filled in all of his own personal holes he never knew who his father was according to him his father was Yahweh and Jesus is his brother remember that right right boy if you don't have a dad and you need a dad can you do much better than Yahweh come on and he's the there so there's 40 prophets according to him and guess what number he is that'd be number 40 nobody coming after him you know he's the 40th and final

that's pretty convenient as well it's all stuff like that and even the immortality through cloning see here's the problem with a religion where there is he creates a religion you guys there's no God there's no soul there's no afterlife well there's also then no mechanism for control because if people are just like you're just me and you're here and you're gone what is my incentive for behaving think about this for a second there are people who are good because it's the right thing to do and then there are people who are good because they don't want to go to hell right did you did you give that some consideration max that he comes up with this religion that takes God out of the picture completely that takes sin and the soul and the afterlife and judgment out of the picture completely but we got to give people a reason to follow it and that reason is immortality but through science instead of salvation take it away well being good is its own reward I mean people don't want to believe that but it is I don't want to just act a certain way because I don't want to go to hell but so the idea of we're not going to reproduce and you know and we're just going to clone and that is how we are going to continue on as human beings he's really light on the science behind downloading the memories uploading them and then very light on that part because that probably would be the most complicated part of this how do you go about doing that I mean there are certain things that they have discovered about memories and that sort of thing and manipulations with that which is like in that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and we've talked about this here and probably on the radio show our memories are not stored in order like in a library with books on a shelf at all no our memories are as a result the way that we remembered as a result of what has happened to us up until that point which is why people have different ways of looking at the situations why there's so much unreliability in the way that we remember things even even a shared event people all remember in a different way because of everything that's happened to us up until that point and that's the way we perceive it and the way it ends up getting stored I this whole thing um you know like I knew a little bit about realism because there are UFOs involved you know I was going to say I knew a little bit about it because there were topless women involved I've got to be honest well Max that's what we're a good team you know we divide our areas of expertise okay and our areas of enthusiasm but I didn't until I took this big long dive into this did not realize like how fakakta this is and how difficult it is for it to stand up to scrutiny of any kind and he did so Raelle when Raelle launched this religion in the early 1970s he didn't have the benefit of a lot of the things we have now including you know the internet and Dolly the clone sheep we now know things um even casually that make you go I'm sorry what did you say is happening here in Rael's defense the old whore masters my grandmother would say in Rael's defense he just wants to look at young girls breasts now grandma you're right

I will say that the stuff they've done with stem cells it has saved a friend of mine's life with bone cancer and he has lived five years beyond what anybody ever thought he would and his cancer is he's completely cancer free because of stem cell stuff that he had done so I've been really sad at the way stem cell research has been politicized because you can have stem cell research and therapeutic cloning which is what is being talked about there without you know killing anybody or activating anybody's we now have the ability and this is going to be in a future true weird stuff episode the brain in the jar episode we do have the ability now to take a cell from like your cheek and activate it so that it reverts to its embryonic stage where here's what this means a skin cell from Max's cheek is a skin cell from Max's cheek but if I can send it back to its pluripotent is the scientific word or embryonic settings that cell from Max's cheek can become a full version of Max it can be anything it can be eyes it can be hair it can be a liver it can be anything so if we have the ability to do that um it's disappointing to me it's disappointing to me that we're entering a new dark ages and we just get super hyper activated by key phrases and buzzwords like stem cell I'm not for killing babies neither am I Jim but we're not even talking about that like we're talking about something that's completely different and separate and I do find it interesting that nobody gives a damn about Henrietta Lacks and her enormous contribution to humanity and to the frontiers of knowledge you don't care about that stem cell line do you it's one of the protected ones why you know why why can't we responsibly and thoughtfully and mindfully go down that path of knowledge for the betterment of humans do you have any idea the kind of suffering we might be able to alleviate through some of these therapies and therapeutic cloning I mean like your friend Max like your friend we've already seen I mean I've already seen that with him he said well I'm going to go he said he was working for a company that had really good insurance and he was getting ready to he's getting ready to retire and he said well he said luckily I can do this now and so he went to a place in Houston Texas where they were able to take care of him and so you know science is always throughout history people have had this conundrum with science is this the right thing to do are we playing God at every point along the line and I think that the thing that you have to do is make sure that you don't get anybody named Dr. Evil involved from one of them and there are you know there are so many ways to get at this that would be ethical but I do understand how do you have a big conversation with the population at large about stuff this complicated and the problem is your ethics might be different than my ethics might be somebody else's ethics and it's murky it's really really difficult and so what

we end up doing and perhaps correctly is we go this is so tricky and so complicated that we're just going to not do it we're going to make it we're going to put a ban, a taboo on it because we don't know we don't understand all of it and we don't have any idea where all the lines of consequence lead which I think is fair to say about cloning because it's very easy to go well we're going to clone we're going to clone the dog or we're going to clone your dad but then did you ever stop to think that maybe if I do clone your child from your or the siblings genetic material that I'm dealing with shortened telomeres and that cloned child may not live very long I'm dying to know what happened with Paris Hilton's dog whether that dog is like the dog she had before or Barbra Streisand's dog whether it's whether they're happy they did it and then as we've talked about their health problems with the dog I don't know about Paris but I read here's why because if you tell me you're cloning your dog that gets my attention, I will click on that headline so I remember reading she has these dogs I'm probably going to mispronounce the breed it's a Coton Tulliere little white precious dogs whimsical, adorable, smart loyal, precious little white dogs so in this interview I'm reading with her about cloning these dogs she's like listen I've heard every objection I know, I know, the cost it's not really the same dog I've heard it all she said but you've got to understand I've had dogs my whole life this dog was special this dog was unlike any other dog there were aspects to this dog's personality that I've never seen before never expect to see again that's why I cloned the dog and she's got the money to do it, right?

you know I would do that with I would certainly do that with Mojo but the thing about it is you're not really getting Mojo again you're getting, you know, for all the reasons we've already talked about that's like I can, I will say um I completely understand cloning Mojo and I will go so far as to say knowing Mojo as I do you ain't never going to get another Mojo but buddy if you even got close that's true yeah if you even got close it would be worth it but now let me talk to you about cloning your brother because if you got close it's not worth it, it's uncanny valley and it's giving you the creeps so and I do think that in the cloning industry, the pet cloning industry at large I think that's kind of the general consensus like we make no promises I cannot bring your dog back but you're going to get close and that's going to be good enough for you you cannot tell me that it would be good enough with a person I don't believe that either I don't believe you you really are you really are playing God and I really have some real problems with that it makes me so and I love science especially creepy science it makes me so nervous and in the episode that I talked about and we're probably it's coming up sometime in February the brain in the jar episode we don't freaking understand what we're playing with we just don't because we do things and this of course is the scientific process if I do X and add Y what happens if I do X and add W what happens right that's part of the process but one of the things we're learning when it comes to cloning and DNA and human cells and animal cells is we really don't know what we're doing or what's coming next or what might happen and I'm just going to give you this last little thing to think about before we break so in that episode the brain in a jar they experimented with can we grow can we grow functional human brain cells in a petri dish can we do like a little human brain in a petri dish and turns out we can we can grow human brain cells in a petri dish and those brain cells surprisingly are responsive to stimuli and they've been able to keep these little petri dish brains going not just for days or weeks but in some cases for years and over time as these clumps of brain cells exist in their petri dish and are exposed to stimuli, light, sound, electricity, what have you those cells begin developing in response to that stimuli and in the most unsettling case those cells, that clump of brain cells begins developing primitive structures for eyes and you can see it that is very very trippy and they have taken these they call them organoids they have taken these brain organoids and successfully transplanted them into the brains of animals so that they can then study how that tissue engages and here's what I can tell you about that, we can put human brain tissue into an animal brain and it thrives and everybody is fine or are they?

I was going to say, or are they? Or are they? So that's the thing, like isn't it wonderful to be curious? Humans are the most curious creature in the world but you know what they say about curiosity and the cat we don't know what we're doing curiosity killed the cat but I'm only 80% the same as a cat so there's that 90% you're 90% and don't even get me started on how much genetic similarity you share with a banana it's just too good so yeah, just think about that just think about what we're playing with when we play with that and then ask yourself what are the flipping chances that when you die a piece of you is going to be sent to the Elohim's planet they're going to drop it into a fish tank and your 15 year old body is going to walk out to get all your memories installed you're right ok you know what?

let me know how that works out for y'all and that is this episode of True Weird Stuff what are we doing? what are we doing on the next True Weird Stuff? I've already forgotten this may be one of my favorite episodes we will ever do, Max it's the most hapless outlaw in the wild west and his journey through time and how this most hapless outlaw in the wild west became the inspiration for one of the greatest cartoon villains of all time and the six million dollar man's involved and, and, and, and, and this is like, this is our total jam, buddy, this is it this is our kind of story and it is next time on True Weird Stuff thanks for listening we'll see you on the next episode and if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content, everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production, our executive producer is Anthony Garcia the show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten, our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser, additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call, our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr, original graphics by Kevin Nash, original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash, copyright 2025 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered