Discussion of cloning in the popular media often presents the subject negatively. In an article in the 8 November 1993 article of Time, cloning was portrayed in a negative way, modifying Michelangelos Creation of Adam to depict Adam with five identical hands. Newsweek' 10 March 1997 issue also critiqued the ethics of human cloning, and included a graphic depicting identical babies in beakers.
The concept of cloning, particularly human cloning, has featured a wide variety of science fiction works. An early fictional depiction of cloning is Bokanovskys Process which features in Aldous Huxleys 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World. The process is applied to fertilized human eggs in vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original. Following renewed interest in cloning in the 1950s, the subject was explored further in works such as Poul Andersons 1953 story UN-Man, which describes a technology called "exogenesis", and Gordon Rattray Taylors book The Biological Time Bomb, which popularised the term "cloning" in 1963.
Cloning is a recurring theme in a number of contemporary science fiction films, ranging from action films such as Anna to the Infinite Power, The Boys from Brazil, Jurassic Park (1993), Alien Resurrection (1997), The 6th Day (2000), Resident Evil (2002), Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), The Island (2005) and Moon (2009) to comedies such as Woody Allens 1973 film Sleeper'.
The process of cloning is represented variously in fiction. Many works depict the artificial creation of humans by a method of growing cells from a tissue or DNA sample; the replication may be instantaneous, or take place through slow growth of human embryos in artificial wombs. In the long-running British television series Doctor Who, the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela were cloned in a matter of seconds from DNA samples ("The Invisible Enemy", 1977) and then – in an apparent homage to the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage – shrunk to microscopic size to enter the Doctors body to combat an alien virus. The clones in this story are short-lived, and can only survive a matter of minutes before they expire. Science fiction films such as The Matrix and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones' have featured scenes of human foetuses being cultured on an industrial scale in mechanical tanks.
Cloning humans from body parts is also a common theme in science fiction. Cloning features strongly among the science fiction conventions parodied in Woody Allens Sleeper, the plot of which centres around an attempt to clone an assassinated dictator from his disembodied nose. In the 2008 Doctor Who story "Journeys End", a duplicate version of the Tenth Doctor spontaneously grows from his severed hand, which had been cut off in a sword fight during an earlier episode.
After the death of her beloved 14-year-old Coton de Tulear named Samantha in late 2017, Barbra Streisand announced that she had cloned the dog, and was now "waiting for [the two cloned pups] to get older so [she] can see if they have [Samantha's] brown eyes and her seriousness". The operation cost $50,000 through the pet cloning company ViaGen.