Cloning is not Copying: “Unfortunately, the idea of clones as copies has found a prominent place in our cloning conversations. Ian Wilmut, who headed the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, used the term early and often as he sought to demonstrate his revulsion at the idea of human reproductive cloning – at ‘copying people’.

But people cannot be copied. Our mirror image will never come to life on our side of the looking glass. Reconstructing a new person using a single cell taken from a progenitor would duplicate only the genome. The clone would be a later-born identical twin. While the copying metaphor may lend itself more readily to clones than twins because, sequentially, the clone follows the progenitor, the term is as misleading applied to one as it is to the other. Perhaps the most profound and pernicious of the misunderstandings about cloning is that genetic identity is equivalent to personal identity.” —Guardian.UK