I'm not saying that. I'm sure he was more aware of the advances in the scientific community than most people at the time, though I find it far more likely that his interest and research into that community extended so far as linguistics, history, culture, and environment. Anything else would be secondary.Mandy wrote:You don't think FH was aware of what was going on in the scientific world?
The reason I think this is because Hayt was a ghola, not a clone. Clones weren't even mentioned as an alternative. You might notice that FH had the concepts of genetic memory and prescience heavily twined into his story, and those aren't exactly scientifically-sound. Even at his time I'm sure they were more common perception rather than scientific opinion.
My point is that gholas, like genetic memory and prescience, were concepts though up solely as plot devices (akin to the BJ) to tell the story. I imagine that once FH started GEoD and decided he wanted to use Duncan as a character again he would have realized he wrote himself into a wall: gholas are cadavers of the actual people they represent. Hayt would have long rotted by then. So it's very likely that he remembered cloning, which was then becoming a popular topic, and then began research into it. It fixed his problem easily enough and didn't contradict anything before.
That still sounds more like forced twinning to me rather than the modern concept of cloning that FH used.http://library.thinkquest.org/C0122429/ ... istory.htm1952: Briggs and King cloned tadpoles
Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned northern leopard frog using nuclear transfer.
The purpose of the experiment was to study the activation and deactivation of genes during cell development. Using a glass pipette with a width between the cell’s nucleus and the cell’s width, King removed the nucleus from a blastula cell, an embryo cell during the period in which the embryo is only about 8 – 16 thousand cells. The outer part of the cell was crushed and broke away as the nucleus is sucked into the pipette. A glass needle was then used to remove the egg’s own nucleus, and was replace with the nucleus of the blastula cell. Finally, Briggs and King cloned 27 tadpoles from 104 nuclear transfers. Those few surviving tadpoles cloned from differentiated cells were abnormal, leading Briggs and King to believe that adult differentiated cells cannot be used to clone an organism.