At what point do you declare success? I suppose a reasonable successful cloning is when you have the baby is born, and doesn’t have obvious life threatening health problems.
The problem for cloning is that it usually takes many tries before you get a successful birth. So one cloning attempt isn’t going to cost much more than an IVF procedure. But you’re going to have to expect a lot of failures, so you’ll need dozens of procedures before you can expect one success. Poking around, it seems that an IVF cycle will cost in the neighborhood of $12,000. That’s harvesting the eggs and sperm, creating the embryo, and implanting the embryo. But you might need multiple IVF cycles before you get a successful pregnancy.
Every indication we have is that with today’s methods of cloning, cloning is much less successful than IVF. So one human cloning trial is bound to cost similar to however many IVF cycles before you get a successful birth. So if it took a hundred cycles on average for one success, the cost could be a hundred times the cost of a single IVF cycle.
But the reason no ethical fertility specialist will accept your money is simply due to that very high failure rate. It’s an unacceptable rate for a human fertility treatment. With animal experiments it’s fine, but our techniques have to be perfected before we can ethically start human trials. So your answer today would be zero. It is still an experimental procedure that should’t be done on human babies.
Do you like her better with blonde hair?
