Question: Hi David, do you believe that in a few years we will be able to clone humans / animals using the same process.

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 6 Mar 2019:

So my own work involves molecular cloning – this isn’t the same as cloning animals, it’s just a term we use to describe changing a DNA sequence in bacteria. (or copy-pasting of different DNA sequences). Cloning an animal is different: in order to clone an animal you need to take body cells, “reverse-specialise” them to become stem cells (in development, you start out with just stem cells. these have the ability to become any other cell type, for example brain cells or muscle cells etc.) and implant these into a mother as an embryo. The first mammal this was done with was a sheep called Dolly, so it can definitely be done!
Unfortunately, this process of “reverse-specialising” isn’t perfect, and therefore lead to severe health problems later in life for Dolly. For this reason scientists don’t really experiment with human cloning, as far as I know most work done in this direction is to induce human cells to become a specific tissue, so that you can for example grow a replacement heart in a petri dish.
While the technologies are definitely advancing and will further do so in the next few years, I believe the ethical boundaries will be much more important: even if you could clone a human, why should you do so? I don’t think it will happen anytime soon.