Will our clones still be hot for each other?
A few weeks after I met my wife, I experienced an emotion I’d never felt before: I wanted to make her pregnant.
The feeling hit me hard as we lounged on the bed in her NYC studio. It was visceral and powerful and I instinctively knew that it couldn’t be denied. The urge was primal. Biological.
Twelve years later, we have two wonderful kids and we’re still going strong. We’ll soon celebrate our “110th birthday” — she’ll turn fifty, and a few days later, I’ll hit sixty.
My only regret is that I wish I’d met her earlier in my life. We’d have decades more travel, meals, and fooling around. And we’d probably have a bunch more kids.
We can’t change the past — but we can shape the future. Which is why I’m hoping to clone us after we’re dead.
I’m a fan of human cloning. Identical twins are natural clones and there’s no technical reason why we can’t be cloned intentionally. I expect that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, cloning will be legally available at fertility clinics.
For this reason, I’ve been prototyping a new company to “back up” human lives for future “twinning.” This involves cryobanking a person’s cells, putting money into a perpetual trust attached to those cells, and archiving information about their life. My wife and I will be the first people the company backs up, perhaps by the end of the year.
There’s no absolute guarantee that we’ll ever be cloned. But, banked, we’ll at least have the possibility.
Of course, our clones might want nothing to do with each other. They’ll be different people with different lives.
But if our clones are as hot for each other as we are — if the attraction we feel for each other runs deep — who knows?
We might have another lifetime together.
Andrew Hessel is the co-author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. He’s also the co-founder of Humane Genomics and the Genome Project-write. a champion of whole-genome engineering. He loves thinking about possible futures through the lens of biology.
