Any single body cell contains the full replicable template of the individual.

Evidence

My genetic patrimony was fixed once and for all when a certain spermatozoa encountered a certain ovum. This heritage contains the recipe for all the biochemical processes that realized me and ensure my functioning. A copy of this recipe is inscribed in each of the dozens of millions of cells that constitute me today. Each of these cells knows how to manufacture me; before being a cell of my liver or of my blood, it is a cell of me. It is thus theoretically possible to manufacture an individual identical to me starting with one of these cells. (Professor A. Jacquard) Cloning is thus the last stage of the history and modeling of the body, the one at which, reduced to its abstract and genetic formula, the individual is destined to serial propagation. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 337

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking how far 1981-era genetics supported the claim that any cell can manufacture the whole body — today’s differentiation/enucleation biology complicates Jacquard’s framing.