I found this on another forum.
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Many people seem to believe that Hair Multiplication (Cloning) be a cure for baldness.
Cloning would offer an endless supply of donor hair. Allowing that a patients hairline is limited only by his desire or budget.
Aside from the fact that it could be years away, we do not know how safe it will be.
Also, you would still need these hairs implanted via surgery, leaving the success of your hair-cloning experience dependent on the skills of the surgeon who implants these newly cloned hairs.
Why FUE yield is comparable to HM / Cloning
The proposal to implant only folicular units published by Bernstein and Rassman changed the industry, resulting in transplants that finally looked natural. Aside from scarring the main limitation left to deal with was the limited supply of available donor hair.
A forum member JRF posted a recent study published in the journal
Dermatol Surg 2001 Sep, 28(9):795.9
by Hwang S, et al. which finds that hair tranplanted to a recipient site, will take on some
of the characteristics (most importantly, length and growth rate) as the hair native to the recipient site(i.e. Leg hair transplanted to the head will grow faster and longer than it did while on the leg and vice versa).
There may still be some debate as to the best method to extract donor hair from the back of the head, that is not the point. The point is that the FUE process opens up the donor area to the chest, back, abdomin, legs, and arms.
If the findings of this study turn out to be true, then the implications are profound. Surgeons could use the seemingly endless supply of body/limb hair to add as much
density as the patient desires, or can afford.