In the public domain, developments within the spectrum of human cloning will be argued as happening for the first time, but in the recesses of monolithic research divisions, government-borne, military industrial complex borne and of private entities, humanity as we know is being tampered with – human cloning – in breach of the presumption of the world moratorium. Just as surveillance and metadata intercept research and monitoring have long been secretly underway than what is acknowledged so too is the case, without reservation, with human cloning.

The future that will be say 2100 will be one of various human clones, robotics with various degrees of consciousness/sentience, multiple forms of hybrids, forays into the organ that we refer to as the human mind and its replication into sentient robotics, all this that today’s world would be troubled by. As communication transmissions have arisen by ‘wire’ and then ‘wirelessly’, so too computronics are arising without the hardware, and so too will communications be enabled for instance telepathically. Tampering and tinkering with DNA the likes yet imagined by the wider world are inevitable as what is today the case was inevitable a half century ago despite an abhorrence of it by various stalwarts and public think tanks in their day.

For the first time, supposedly, cloning technologies were used to produce stem cells that are genetically matched to adult patients – this in recent months, with research studies published, reporting the creation of human embryos for this purpose – sailing close to the wind with the moratorium but not breaching it. But shadow states and other clandestine advent have already cloned humans, this of course will be rejected by all and sundry, including most social commentators, but it will be the case that in time to come, the first human clones will be acknowledged as having been generated not long after Dolly.

To step back into time a little, Dolly, a sheep, born July 5, 1996 and she was euthanised on February 14, 2003. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell by nuclear transfer. Dolly was cloned at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute alongside biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics and the Ministry of Agriculture. Dolly was cloned from a cell from another sheep taken from the mammary gland and hence her cloning proved that a whole individual could be recreated. But Dolly had three mothers – and let us remind ourselves of today’s world with surrogacy – one provided the egg, another the DNA and the third carried the cloned embryo.

The technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer was used where the cell nucleus from an adult was transferred into an unfertilised oocyte – developing egg cell – which had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell was then stimulated by an electric shock to divide and when developed into a blastocyst is implanted in the surrogate mother. But the day will come when a surrogate mother will be replication – laboratory induced. The whole process – including the embryonic term – will be within the laboratory, for want of a better turn of phrase.

Dolly’s birth was not announced to the world until February 22 the following year, and what followed was huge media attention, ethical conundrums and the call for the moratorium. Dolly was not the first animal to be cloned but she was the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell. Dolly gave birth to six lambs – a bub in April 1998, twins the following year and triplets the year after. But Dolly developed premature arthritis and lung disease from the age of four and as anti-inflammatory medication and treatments could not counter the progress of the diseases and as a result she was euthanised in 2003, and in terms of a sheep’s life expectancy, reaching thereabouts a half-life.

Dolly’s legacy brought the successful cloning of other large mammals; pigs, bulls, deer. Scrutinised reports of cloning are in the hundreds, with the majority of clones failing to reach adulthood, but it is understood that the less public accessible research and cloning developments in China have an 80 per cent rate of success of clones reaching adulthood.

Cloning of extinct species is possible, as demonstrated by the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon, Spain when they announced the successful cloning of the Pyrenean Ibex, an extinct wild mountain goat. The newborn died shortly after birth from physical defects but the birth nevertheless occurred from frozen tissue.

In March 1997, President Bill Clinton responded to the widespread media hysteria with support for a moratorium and described human cloning as a “troubling prospect”. President Clinton on the surface banned the use of federal funds for human cloning experiments so as to allow time for scientists and governments to discuss the issues. President Clinton called on privately funded researchers to voluntarily implement a temporary moratorium on human cloning research.

“Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry, it is a matter of morality and spirituality as well,” said President Clinton at a White House news conference.

A little over a decade ago the American Medical Association responded to the moratorium with, “animal cloning has produced some remarkable results within the last few years, which has suggested to some that there should be a way to produce a human clone within the next year. Many news articles have appeared recently highlighting the potential to clone a human baby in order to replace a loved one who died as a newborn.”

“Many social, moral, and ethical arguments have been raised in opposition to copying a person. For more details see AMA’s 1999 CEJA Report: The Ethics of Cloning (PDF, 41KB). But perhaps more important is the concern that we do not fully understand the science behind the successes from animal cloning experiments.”

Today, CNN’s Elizabeth Landau reported that In the last several months scientists placed the nucleus of an adult skin cell inside an egg, and the reconstructed egg went through the initial stages of embryonic development.

“This is a dream that we’ve had for 15 years or so in the stem cell field,” writes Ms Landau of John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Stem cells have the potential to develop into any kind of tissue in the human body. From growing organs to treating diabetes, many future medical advances are hoped to arise from stem cells.

Ms Landau reports that scientists wrote in the journal Cell Stem Cell this month that they used skin cells from a man, 35, and another man, 75, to create stem cells from cloned embryos.

“We reaffirmed that it is possible to produce patient-specific stem cells using a nuclear transfer technology regardless of the patient’s age,” said co-lead author Young Gie Chung at the CHA Stem Cell Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

On Monday, an independent group led by scientists at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute published results in Nature using a similar approach. They used skin cells from a 32-year-old woman with Type 1 diabetes to generate stem cells matched to her.

Ms Landau writes that both new reports follow the groundbreaking research published last year by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues at Oregon Health & Science University in the journal Cell. In that study, researchers produced cloned embryos and stem cells using skin cells from a foetus and an 8-month-old baby.

“It’s a remarkable process that gives us these master cells, these stems cells that are essentially the seeds for all of the tissues in our bodies,” said George Daley, director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, who was not involved in the recent studies. “That’s why it’s so important for medical research.”

Embryonic stem cell research is controversial because to use the stem cells for developing medical treatments, the embryo is destroyed. Embryos have the potential to develop into a fully formed human, hence the tumult of ethical questions. But scientists later realised they did not need to use embryos to obtain stem cells that match patients. But the question remains, which cells at this time, with the technology at hand, secret or otherwise, produce the best cloning outcomes? – cells from cloned embryos or from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) that can be generated directly from adult cells.

All the news media on cloning will continue to be about ‘incremental developments’ especially in terms of research to treat widespread ailments such as diabetes but what is occurring in the huge research divisions of private multinational companies and with the shadow states with the aid of both federal and private funding are what the news will not be and cannot be about, the whole scale human cloning, the tinkering with DNA to design human beings for a whole new world and for objectives only articulated to some degree within cinematic experiences and science fiction novels. Where it becomes complicated is where excessive self interest groups and shadow states are involved, where competition between human interest groups are drivers – such as the military industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his January 1961 farewell speech not only to the American nation but to the world. His farewell speech can be listened to below.

For all the widespread public talk about the ethics of cloning a human individual and then from that cloned individual its sentient connection to its historical human self and its valuing of identity, and however that individual is designed and has been tampered with, and from many of these clones there shall arise offspring – there are already among us human clones in any number of forms. This article is an introduction to a series by The Stringer on human cloning and to the world that awaits those to come, and to what already is at play, secretly and otherwise. Once again, the general public has been denied inclusion in any wholesale discussion, and denied the right of the balance and check of that discussion acting as a monitor to protect humanity from the effects of some of the privately sponsored science and tampering with humanity.