the concept of cloning had been so far fetched until the first mammal was successfully cloned that the way people thought about it, the entire public perception of cloning, was through the lens of apocalyptic science fiction. so when dolly happens there's this massive moral panic, i mean massive enough to cause governments to ban human cloning before it was even possible, because people envisioned the dystopian scifi future of clones instead of reality. and like fine okay we know this and this tends to happen with science in general. the public has access to speculation and sensationalist media exploits that, blah blah. usually, after the technology becomes ubiquitous in industry, those old scifi ideas don't have any relevance in the public eye anymore
but it feels like cloning has never managed to break through that barrier. if you mention cloning to people who aren't interested in science or medicine they imagine, at the very least, a fetus in a lab, or they straight up don't believe that it's possible and ubiquitous. and news about cloning always reeks of sensationalism. an influencer recently got a lab to create a bunch of stem cells from his own blood in order to test out therapies and grow tissue that could help cure an incurable autoimmune disease that he has. and the headlines about it look like this
which is not only extremely misleading, but also fascinatingly vintage. i thought we got over cloning like thirty years ago. this isn't new at all. why is it that every time cloning makes the news, the general reaction is as if it's some kind of evil new technology?
my hypothesis: real-life cloning is just so fucking boring, and so different from what everyone was initially expecting from the first media shock, that it just doesn't register in the public mind as cloning at all. i mean, they told us we'd have armies of cloned hitlers, and now we don't have armies of cloned hitlers, we just have like, better cows. so it must be that cloning never happened. because the cloning that exists in my mind never happened