How to Clone the Perfect Blonde: Using Science to Make Your Wildest Dreams Come True

  • Sue Nelson &
  • Richard Hollingham
Quirk Books/Ebury Press: 2004. 272 pp. $16.95/£7.99 0091892287 | ISBN: 0-091-89228-7

The challenge facing authors addressing politically sensitive issues such as stem-cell research, cloning and robotics lies less with the technicalities and more with the emotion and prejudice surrounding these subjects. Cloning especially revolts many people who lack the foggiest idea of what is actually involved. The authors of How to Clone the Perfect Blonde manage to tackle this topic head-on and non-judgmentally by adopting a mixture of fast-paced exposition and gentle humour. That they manage to do this without either patronizing the reader or trivializing the subject is a tribute to their skill. And the formula works equally well with speculative and popular, but technically difficult, topics, such as quantum teleportation and time travel.

Teleportation technology has leapt from the screenplay of Star Trek, where it was motivated primarily by the need for a cheap special effect, to the real world of quantum engineering. One of the key properties of quantum particles such as photons is that they may be put into an ‘entangled’ state. Two entangled photons, even when far apart, remain linked by what Einstein called “spooky action-at-a-distance”. Although entangled states cannot be used to send information faster than light, they can be used to reconstruct replicas-at-a-distance. So far, this has been restricted to single particle states a kilometre or so apart, but that has not stopped some enthusiasts imagining scanning a human body, atom by atom, and reconstructing it on Mars, say. Despite the wackiness of this notion, the physics of quantum information is a hot topic, bearing on practical developments such as quantum cryptography and the race to build a code-busting quantum computer.

And therein lies the value of this book. By addressing a wild and engaging speculation, the authors use it as a peg to cover much valuable science. In the chapter on time travel we learn the basics of the theory of relativity and some of its more advanced ramifications, such as black holes and wormholes. No matter that unrestricted time travel may be a pipe dream, it's a fun topic that we can all identify with, and it involves some interesting mainstream physics and astronomy that might seem dull in a more prosaic context.

My favourite fantasy, which comes near the end of the book, is the idea of uploading the contents of my brain on to a supercomputer, to serve both as a back-up in case something horrible happens to the original and as a gateway to a universe of simulated reality, offering potentially limitless fun. Although technically challenging, to say the least, it is hard to see any obstacles of principle to this procedure, and it raises the unsettling question of how I can be sure that the reality I experience is the ‘real’ reality or just a simulation. Or indeed, whether there is any meaningful distinction between them.

The reader taking a random walk through this speculative playground will learn some surprising facts to help with future quiz nights. I was particularly intrigued to learn about a slime mould able to find its way through a maze, and the disembodied lamprey brain stem that can control a remote robot by responding to light signals. First prize for inventiveness, however, must go to the smart underwear designed to control the temperature of the room the wearer is in.

As the saying goes, there is something for everybody here, not least for scientists at the sharp end of research, who may be in danger of taking themselves too seriously.