By Bulletin Staff
In a well-lit lab in the basement of a non-descript campus building at Central Idaho State University near Idaho Falls, Dr. Matthew Bennell peers through a powerful microscope at a single cell. As he watches, the doctor holds his breath as the cell divides into two.
“And so it begins,” Dr. Bennell says, smiling as leans back from the microscope.
What’s begun is the first phase of what Dr. Bennell and his team hope will be a successful zombie-to-human cloning process, using cells from a zombie to recreate the original human in their pre-zombified state. The team believes that the techniques they are developing offer the potential to reclaim the humanity stolen from victims of the zombie virus.
“The virus takes away everything that makes us people,” Dr. Bennell says. “Our work aims to put the ‘human’ back in humanity.”
“CRISPR-Cas9 Was a Game-Changer”
Bennell’s research into zombie-to-human cloning dates back more than 10 years, but it is only with the recent advances in the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology that his team has seen promising results from their experiments with zombie-to-human cloning.
“CRISPR-Cas9 was a game-changer because it allowed us to systematically edit the genes in cells taken from an undead subject, essentially reconstructing the full DNA of a zombified person,” says Dr. Janice Singh, the team’s lead DNA scientist.
Dr. Singh explains that the team begins by carefully harvesting cells from various parts of a zombified subject’s body, then uses gene editing to strip out damaged genetic material and combine undamaged material to recreate the subject’s original human DNA within a single cell.
The nucleus of this new “donor cell” is then removed and inserted into a donor egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed (a so-called “enucleated egg”), and the team uses a chemical treatment to stimulate the two cells to fuse together. This cell can then start to divide and, theoretically, develop into an embryo, just as a normally fertilized egg would.
Limited Success to Date
“Theoretically” is an important qualifier here, because Dr. Bennell and his team have achieved limited success with cell division to date. Their most successful trial to date saw the cells continue to divide for three days, reaching a total of 16 cells, before the cells begin to attack each other until they were all destroyed.
“Something happens in the morula [the cell cluster], once it reaches that stage, where the cells just seem to become single-cell micro-zombies,” Dr. Singh says. “It’s as if some quality of undeadness continues to exist in the cells beyond what is in the DNA, causing the cells to devour one another.”
Currently the team is experimenting with injecting various anti-viral cocktails into the cells, bathing the cells in different chemical formulations, and performing repeated rounds of gene editing once the cells start to divide. The goal: Disrupt or prevent the cellular cannibalism process and nurture the cells into a full-fledged embryo.
The team’s research is funded by private donors. Dr. Bennell and the university declined to discuss who is behind the funding, but it’s thought that the bulk of the grant money for the project comes from a handful of Silicon Valley tech titans known informally as the “zombillionaires” for their efforts to fund research to reverse the zombification process.
Critics Raise Ethical Issues
The research has drawn its share of criticism. Peers in the zombie science community have raised questions about whether the zombification process fundamentally alters the DNA in a way that cannot be detected or corrected during the editing process, making it impossible to obtain “purely human” genetic material from the undead.
Skeptics also have suggested that the very process of reconstructing the damaged DNA to obtain a complete and accurate genetic blueprint of the original human could be prone to mistakes and liable to create, at best, an entirely new human rather than a copy of the original, and at worst a human-zombie hybrid.
If the team is able to solve the cell growth problem, the ethical issues around what to do with the embryo loom large. Would they try to grow the embryo in an artificial womb environment? Implant the embryo into a willing human surrogate? What if the embryo turns into a zombie within the womb? What if the embryo passes the zombie virus on to the human host before birth?
Dr. Bennell says that he and his team take these ethical issues very seriously and have engaged with medical and zombie ethics experts to understand and work through the moral questions raised by their work.
Law Needs to Catch Up to the Science
The laws around cloning are another consideration. At least seven US states ban human cloning for any purpose, and another 10 have so-called “clone and kill” laws in place that ban implanting a cloned embryo for purposes of childbirth but allow the embryos to be destroyed.
However, no federal or state laws expressly prohibit the use of zombie cells for the purposes of cloning, and legal experts say that it’s not clear that current laws would cover zombie-to-human cloning.
“It’s a potential loophole in laws around cloning,” says Erin LaCroix, research director at the Center for the Study of Zombies and the Law at the University of Pittsfield Law School in Pennsylvania.
LaCroix added that, until recently, the technology to clone zombie cells just didn’t exist, so it wasn’t an issue that lawmakers or regulators had to consider how to address. “Clearly the time has come for the law to catch up with zombie cloning science,” LaCroix said.
For his part, Dr. Bennell is undeterred by critics of his research. “What drives me is the belief that every life carries a unique and irreplaceable value, even the lives of the living dead. I look forward to the day when we can witness the birth of the world’s first zombie-to-human clone and proclaim, ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’”
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