Two of the da Vinci Project clones are back in the news. Today, lawyers for model and influencer Manda Monroe simultaneously filed restraining orders against 73 men and six women. The move comes on the heels of numerous arrests by police in multiple jurisdictions as part of an international crackdown on cyberstalking of celebrities. While Ms. Monroe’s spokespeople hailed the action as a dramatic move toward women’s safety and artist’s rights, Andi Jo Freiberg, Director of the Wheelhouse Institute, a private media think tank, criticized the move in a post online, noting that none of the arrests were in defense of ordinary women.
This is not an attack on cyberstalking or a defense of women. It is a move by the state to protect the assets of the wealthy, which include celebrities, who are of course themselves wealthy. This is corporate welfare, pure and simple—the deliberate outsourcing of security costs from the wealthy to the people. If the government were actually interested in protecting women, then they would be protecting women.
Manda Monroe, clone of the infamous model and actress, Marilyn Monroe, is the most seen person in the world, with nearly one billion followers worldwide. Loved by her fans, men and women alike, she has been the subject of near-constant media scrutiny since the first pictures of her leaked online at age three.
Meanwhile, fellow clone and former international fugitive Niobium Tesla was attacked and nearly killed after being arrested in the Northern Territories by members of the Canadian military. While the reason for the arrest has not been released, authorities have confirmed that one or more armed individuals stormed the compound where she was being held. Details are still forthcoming, but a spokesman for the Canadian Ministry of Defense indicated several casualties had been airlifted to the local hospital, including Ms. Tesla, who had been stabbed. After undergoing emergency surgery, she remains in custody under 24-hour armed guard. We’ll bring you more from this story as it develops.
Both Ms. Tesla and Ms. Monroe will be turning 30 next year. Here with a special report on the legacy of the da Vinci Project is BBC science correspondent Khalil Jones.
No one knew what to think when the announcement was made. There had been plenty of coverage, but most people expected the project would be stopped before it could be completed. When it was announced that the first embryo had been successfully implanted in a volunteer surrogate, it was too late. The clones were coming.
I remember watching from the back of Ms. Davis’ sixth form class as the world struggled to make sense of it all. Could a dead person be cloned, even with their descendants’ permission? Was that all it took? Ms. Davis told us the clones would be no different than twins separated at birth. They wouldn’t have any of the memories or experiences of those famous people. They would just share their genetic material. Still, something about it seemed wrong.
The da Vinci Project has been a lot of things to a lot of people. The project organizers insist it is now and always has been a scientific enterprise. It was designed, they say, to settle Nature vs. Nurture, to finally answer one of the oldest outstanding questions in the history of thought: How much of who we are is determined before our birth and how much later? Which is stronger, memes or genes?
Originally conceived in jest by the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, it became an unprecedented and controversial project involving multiple governments, corporations, universities, and private agencies. According to the project website, the plan was “to create a baseline of maximum human potential by resurrecting the most influential genomes of the past through cloning; rearing the children in a stable, emotionally healthy environment; and measuring every aspect of their mental, social, and material well-being.”
Much of the early criticism, especially online, focused on how the majority of “genetic donors” were European males, against which the project scientists mounted a spirited defense. They pointed out that several Muslim organizations were asked to participate but that all declined on grounds of faith, as did the family of Martin Luther King, Jr. And while Nelson Mandela’s family agreed, the South African government famously contested the export of their historic leader’s DNA, which it legally classified as a “significant cultural artifact.”
In the end, because the scientists needed to be sure that the donors in question truly had made lasting contributions to humankind, some measure of historical distance was required. Too much distance, however, made it impossible to verify authenticity. Furthermore, since DNA degrades over centuries, that meant the best candidates for the study fell inside the so-called imperial era of world history.
To balance gender, the dVP geneticists switched the sex of three random male donors—Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs, and Nikola Tesla—by deleting their Y chromosome and replacing it with a second copy of their X.
No laws at the time expressly forbade cloning, although both the UN and the EU immediately issued formal condemnations. Facing a mounting legal and regulatory threat, the embryos were flown to Taipei, where surrogate mothers were hired. Thirty years ago this month, the first embryo was successfully implanted. Nine months later, Mutiny Apollo Ali was born.
The donors were, in order of birth: an athlete, Muhammad Ali; a revolutionary, Ernesto Guevara; a novelist, Charlotte Brontë; a poet, Edgar Allan Poe; a spiritual leader, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama; an entrepreneur, Steve Jobs; a scientist, Albert Einstein; a model and actress, Marilyn Monroe; an inventor, Nikola Tesla; a composer, Ludwig van Beethoven; an artist and designer, Leonardo da Vinci; and a monarch, Yekaterina Alekseyevna, better known as Catherine the Great.
It makes sense, as we approach the end of the clones’ third decade, to take stock of what they’ve accomplished, their successes and their failures, and what we’ve learned from them so—
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