How are babies made? Simple enough, female and male, egg and sperm. It’s worked that way for jillions of years, right? But all of that may change in the next decade, in two possible ways…
(1) Human Cloning
Do we have the technology to make a living human clone right now? YES. After Dolly the sheep, and quite a few other mammals, we can certainly clone a person. Have we done it yet? Apart from one aborted try in 2004, probably not.
Will we? I would guess that the answer is yes (regardless of the laws in many countries against such a thing), but not how one might think. We won’t have the crazy dictator cloning himself. Instead, we’ll have a clone born to help save the life of a “sibling”. We may never hear about such a thing, though, since disclosure would lead to prosecution.
(2) Non-traditional reproduction
By this, I mean male-male or female-female reproduction. Are we there yet? No, but we’re pretty close. Ten years? Possibly. Thirty years? Definitely. I would bet somewhere in Europe, with some publicity. Remember Louise Brown, the first “test-tube” baby? But this will be a little different, with publicity for the doctors, but privacy for the parents, due to threats on the life of their child.
