The Trouble With Tribbles: Cloning Pitfalls

SloppyElvis writes: "Millie, The University of Tennessee's cloned cow, has been found dead in her pasture. Spokespersons for the University report the cause of death is unknown.CNN.com has the story. Studied individuals would attribute this and the sundry other cloned-animal deaths to DNA telomere degradation. During mitosis (cell-division), the far ends of the chromosomes are known to degrade and shorten. By the time an animal reaches adulthood, this degradation is significant, and it is transferred to the cloned offspring. Many speculate that when these frayed ends reach a terminal length, your time is up, so to speak. On March 9, 2001, MSNBC reported, "Hundreds of couples have volunteered for an experiment to create cloned children despite strong religious and scientific opposition". I wonder how these people would feel when their clones simply expired? Does anybody remember Blade Runner?"

Comments

Telomere shortening

[Phillip2]

Has been stirring up lots of excitement for many years, largely because it potentially impacts on aging processes and cancer formation. Anything which might have an impact on these two functions of course is er, a cash cow if you will excuse the pun. It probably makes sense to treat information produced under these circumstances with a pinch of salt.

The problem is that there are a number of good counter examples. For instance mice have telomeres some 10 times the length of humans. Do they live longer therefore than humans. Well no. Also it seems that telomerase (the enzyme which lengthens the telomeres) is active in mouse cells. In other words there telomeres do not get any shorter.

Telomere shortening is an attractive proposition of course for causing many things, but at the moment the evidence is lacking. It might be relavant. Alternatively it might have nothing to do with anything much!

Phil