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The Truth about Flash Cloning
"What the hell was he up to?" she muttered. She felt her pulse quicken as she scoured his records. There were DNA profiles on each Spartans, and there were extensive files on the old flash clone techniques that ONI had used to replace the originals. Ackerson had followed the medial records of the replacements as they grew up, succumbed to congenital diseases, and inveitably died. He even had the bodies retrieved and autopsies performed.
. . .
Dr. Halsey's stomach soured. It was her fault, in part, that these replacement children had died so young. They had never perfected flash cloning for an entire human. They had done it anyway thirty years ago because the Earth government was on the verge of falling apart . . collapsing into a hundred civil wars. They had desperately needed the SPARTAN program. And of course, they had done it simply because they could (First Strike, p. 129).
Additionally, here is an excerpt from the same novel in which the flash cloning is used to clone the brain, a feat much more ethical, both morally as well as technologically, than full human subjects:
At Dr. Halsey's insistence, ONI had arranged to have her own brain carefully cloned and her memories flash-transferred to the receptable organs. Only one of the twenty cloned brains survived the process (TFoR, p. 236).
And lastly, here is an excerpt from I Love Bees, which is embraced as canonical, to further illustrate the idea that flash cloning technology does not produce subjects that can survive:
(Because this excerpt is extensive, I have truncated it down, and bolded the significant pieces of dialogue:)
Kamal: Wow. Nice lab.
Aiden: They do plastic surgery research here. So anyway Kamal, how hard is it to flash-clone somebody?
Kamal: Uh, flash cloning is illegal
Aiden: Illegal, sure. Hacking the CP probably is too.
Kamal: I mean like child -blam!- illegal, Aiden.
Aiden: Come on...
Kamal: Sentence to memory modification illegal..
Aiden: It's not that serious, I looked it up.
. . .
Kamal: O.k., it doesn't work.
Aiden: What do you mean, it doesn't work? Of course it works!
Kamal: Flash clones aren't just like rubber stamps of the original.
Aiden: But close right?
Kamal: No you take an embryo and develop it 100x faster than it would have naturally
and what you get is something different--
Aiden: --So we do plastic surgery to make them look right. Hell, you could do that
couldn't you?
Kamal: That isn't what I study.
Aiden: Big deal, study it now.
Kamal: Aiden, all these anomalies pop up because flash clones are forced to go through
time too fast--
Aiden: --Kamal, no science gaff. Give me the executive summary.
. . .
Kamal: Ok, flash clones don't know how to talk.
Aiden: They don't have to talk. Stars wave and smile, Kamal. They walk down red carpets and show off their clothes. Nobody wants to hear them talk.
Kamal: Well they don't know how to wave and smile either.
Aiden: Come again?
Kamal: Clones don't have any muscle memory. No training like you and I just got observing people while we were crawli--
Aiden: --Ok, ok, whatever. Doesn't matter, we'll prop them up behind tables, put sunglasses on them, and make them look arrogant and bored. People love that.
Kamal: Also, they'll drool, like babies.
Aiden: We'll make sure they've got managers with them. (impersonating an agent) Miss
Pop-Star doesn't believe that this role fully realizes her artistic integrity Kamal: Aiden, Christ, would you listen to me! You can train them - intensive therapy - but after a year or two they start to degenerate; metabolic instability.
Aiden: That takes care of the problem of what to do with them afterwards, right?
Kamal: Oh come on, about the time you might get them to be coherent, to talk and walk, all these little errors in their systems add up and you get a metabolic cascade failure---
(Kamal drops glass)
Aiden: Hey, you ok?
Kamal: Oh my God... Yasmine... (runs out)
Flash clones do not survive.
[Edited on 06.05.2009 12:07 PM PDT]