The history of cloning is intimately tied to the history of academic research in the twenty-fourth century and beyond. By the beginning of the century, more than one hundred habitable planets had been discovered and settled, and the expansion of humanity into nearby regions of the galaxy continued apace throughout the century as Old Earth became increasingly uninhabitable.
By the middle of the twenty-fourth century, Oxford University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with about half a dozen others, recognized that the center of human population was receding from Old Earth. They joined together to colonize a more conveniently located planet that would be oriented toward the pursuit of higher education, and in particular, to encourage multidisciplinary efforts through co-location. Intense discussions in committee fail to agree on a name for the new planet. To everyone’s dismay, some media jokester began calling the planet “Hoaxford.” Forced to make a decision quickly, the Joint Naming Committee adopted the only name they could agree upon, the singularly unimaginative name “University.”
The founding universities continued to maintain campuses on Old Earth as well as on other planets, but most disciplines, along with the institutions’ administrative functions, moved to the new planet. The charter of the planet also allowed other colleges and universities, existing or new, large or small, to establish campuses on University. Eventually, over three thousand institutes of higher education established branches on University, or moved there outright.
Early in the twenty-fifth century, a research scientist at Stanford (on University), named Marco Jefferson Eddy, developed a technique for growing fully adult human clones in tanks (in vitro) in just three years. In the course of his research, he made eight clones of his own, as well as three of his colleague, Monica Nguyen. The clones were fully physically viable but were, as it turned out, incapable of any kind of human intelligence.
Meanwhile, MIT professor and neuroprogramming expert Beneficio Rossi had been researching brainscan recording, the ability to capture the entire mental state of an individual human being. The two teams integrated their projects—realizing University’s founders’ vision of interdisciplinary cooperation—and created the first human clone who was more than a genetic identical twin but was also a total re-creation of the cloned individual.
Stanford’s Board of Governors declared the project unethical and insisted that it be closed down. MIT’s governing board, to the contrary, affirming free inquiry as a basic scientific principle, urged that the project be pursued. The dispute was referred to the Governing Board of University, who declared the project fraught with ethical problems and strongly recommended that it be discontinued.
Jeff Eddy, Monica Nguyen, and Ben Rossi remained adamant that their research not be restricted or controlled by any administration or government. Claiming the inviolability of academic and scientific freedom, they were joined in this position by many other scientists on University. Powerfully funded and supported by a number of extremely wealthy individuals who were interested in cloning themselves, the group of scientists applied for and received a planetary charter. They resigned their positions on University, and many of their scientific colleagues—including a team studying Eden’s unusual physical properties—joined them on their new world. They called the planet Bigollo, the actual surname of the extraordinary thirteenth-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonnaci.
The Governing Board of University sued the Republic of Bigollo regarding ownership of the research that the various scientific founders of Bigollo took with them, notably Eddy, Nguyen, and Rossi’s cloning and brainscan programming technology. However, the lawsuit was soon bogged down in the courts of Old Earth because of jurisdictional issues.
The dispute regarding cloning was finally resolved out of court at the end of the century when the new Union of Federated Planets passed a law forbidding the use of cloning-with-brainscan technology anywhere in the Union. Bigollo, however, was specifically exempted from this law and thus became the only place where cloning was permitted.
The cloning and programming process was both expensive and imperfect. Because of minor physical differences between the makers and their clones, brainscan programming was ineffective in about one in sixty clones, leaving them as incapable of thought, feeling, or development as the clones initially created by Eddy and Nguyen. Most clones, however, when brought to consciousness at the end of the process, were so successfully programmed that they initially believed they were their makers, with all their makers’ memories from childhood completely intact.