Newsweek interviews the dentist who wants to clone John Lennon

An interview with Michael Zuk, who purchased one of John Lennon's teeth at auction and is intrigued by the possibility of using it to clone the late Beatle.
From watching news and TV shows about cloning, Zuk learned that teeth are often used as DNA evidence. He hatched the idea while chatting and joking around with a former employee, a woman who offered to be the surrogate mother: “You’d take the DNA, you’d insert it into a cell, then you’d stimulate the cell to reproduce, then you’d insert it into a woman’s uterus to be the host. So it’s kind of almost like artificial insemination."

But he is not sure she should be the one to take on that role. “I think there’d be thousands of people who’d realize it would be an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. So, I ask: How will the project move forward?

The plan is to find a company that will participate in a documentary exploring “DNA sequencing and the legal and ethical issues,” Zuk told me. He added that he has a representative in Hollywood trying to drum up interest in this project, though he was vague on the specifics of the potential film. 

“There’s a lot of time to think these things through, and if it doesn’t work out, it certainly will be something that will be opened up in the future. You can imagine that someone like the dictator of North Korea might start popping up replicas of himself to try to perpetuate his insanity.”

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