#i haven't seen most of the newer trek so this may be disproven by that. i dunno.

[discocuttlefish]

The fact that Star Trek has had Brent Spiner play a whole gang of Soong family members, with the chronologically earliest one being a geneticist has some interesting unintentional in-universe implications. My headcanon is that all the Soong guys after Arik are clones, probably grown in artificial wombs, and probably genetically enhanced. This explains why Noonian was doing his work on some random isolated colony outside of any formal organization. The Soongs are used to hiding their science crimes. This also means that Lore and Data are just the latest generation of a line of mad scientists who have been reproducing asexually for like 200 years.