On Mar. 27, McBill’s Mad Scientists Lab (MSL) scrapped their plans to cure cancer butinstead developed induced pluripotent stem cells that were ultimately used to create a fully-developed clone of former McBill principal Heather Munroe-Blossom (HMB).
Aya Misou, the coordinator behind the project, explained that after many anonymous requests from members of the McBill community, she and her research team have acted on the overwhelming demand for creating an exact replica of Munroe-Blum to act as co-principal next to Suzie Forty-Hands.
“Most of those requests were very enthusiastic,” Misou said. “After publishing a paper back in September of 2013 detailing my success with cloning rodents and small domestic animals, I received loads of emails asking whether it’d be possible for humans as well. At first, I thought it was because people wanted to clone themselves, but the majority of the requests were for HMB.”
Misou explained that a lot of researchers from the MSL expressed initial doubt about cloning the former principal.
“The biggest concern was that the technology would be abused,” Misou said. “One of my colleagues worried that someone would use it to create some kind of HMB army.”
However, the team eventually conceded after receiving the 459th tweet with the hashtag #HMB2.0 from the McBill community.
“There have been a lot of challenges in the scientific world with using stem cells to their fullest potential,” Misou said. “But the demands from the McBill community to create a second HMB to have on campus was overwhelming.”
U3 Arts student and Vice President Communications of Cult #HMB Nas Talja, who was one of the many students who submitted a request, emphasized the sentiments that he and his friends felt toward having HMB back at McBill.
“We love the current principal,” Talja said. “But we also really miss the ability to refer to the principal with an acronym. It was just so much easier that way. Obviously the real HMB has moved on, but the logical solution was to just clone her so that we could have someone here who we could regularly talk about with only three letters.”
HMB’s clone has not had direct interaction with the general public yet, but Misou anticipated that those interactions are very possible within the next week. The new co-principal is presently undergoing cognitive moulding which should instill in her the very same apathy towards student issues that enchanted the McBill community for a full decade.
“The procedure went very well,” Misou explained. “My team and I fully believe that once the clone is no longer lab-bound, she will be able to promise consultation and move in the entirely opposite direction—almost as if you were speaking with the real HMB.”
Talja said he will be one of the first to make an appointment with HMB’s clone, and is expecting to wait at least a month to hear back from her office.
“We like having our voices heard, but we also miss having them ignored,” he said. “Science has really come so far. I can’t wait for the day where we’ll be able to 3-D print a version of Forty-Hands.”
This story is a work of satire and appeared as part of our April Fools Issue 2014.
