There’s news about the Woolly Mammoth cloning attempts again. This gets floated every few years, and nothing has come of it…yet. I assume with enough money and time invested it will come to fruition. And whoever invests their time and energy and gets a successful return will probably get really famous, really quickly. But I’ve recently been thinking of a more practical application of cloning: reproducing enormous numbers of individuals who are mostly replicates of John von Neumann.*
To get a sense of why, see this Steve Hsu post. You can read about how much of a genius von Neumann (he was a source for Dr. Strangelove), but his legend is even larger in the oral history of mathematical science. There are still individuals alive who knew von Neumann personally, and they continue to maintain the memory of his preternatural mind.
My argument for cloning von Neumann in large numbers has a practical rationale: the world needs genius to maintain complex human civilization. John von Neumann certainly qualifies as a genius. And we need more than one, as it is likely that there is a random element to the expression of his particular brilliance.
* von Neumann is buried in Princeton, so partially degraded DNA would have to be extracted from his grave. One can also utilize DNA from his daughter, who is still alive.