Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-64.33.250.214-20140727012831

1.64.167.3 wrote: I have not read all the recent posts in detail, but I would just like to give an impression of how quickly accelerated again kicks in in real life genetics. So far there's never been a documented study of a human clone, but for the ease of discussion here, I will talk as if what was learned from the sheep clone is 100% applicable to human clones too.

Clones in real life do show accelerated aging, but not in the way that the clone will look like 20 when he's 15, and then look like 50 when he's 30. It's more like the clone would look like 10 when he's 10, look like 20 when he's 20, but when he gets to a certain age after his teens, he will start aging a lot more obviously. Solid Snake's case is somewhat close to this -- in that he looks like 70 years old when he's 40 but look more or less like a man at his mid-40s in MGS2, at the age of 33-35 (note that the graphics in MGS2 and TTS are much less detailed than MGS4 and MGSV, making it hard to tell how old does he really look like in those games, hence I said "more or less").

Of course, Naomi explained that the clone Snakes were created to have shorter life spend, so whether that "makes a difference" is beyond me, but to say that Solidus would look like someone in his 20s when he's in his early teens, is not not quite likely. The clones of Big Boss weren't ordinary clones. Their genetics were purposely altered. Despite Solidus supposedly being the last clone, The Patriots needed him to look older. When Solidus was in his 20s, he was elected US President. The minimum age for election is 35, and most presidents are usually older than that. Solidus became President in 2001. In 2009 during the events of MGS2, Ocelot comments that Solidus is the spitting image of Big Boss. The only image gamers had of Big Boss at the time, was his appearances between MG1 and MG2 where he was 60-64 years old. Implying Solidus in MGS2 looked around 60 years old. So if Solidus looked 60 in his 30s, then the accelerated aging clearly worked much faster for him.