Goodbye, Dolly

goombah99 writes "Dolly, the famous cloned sheep has been put to death after being diagnosed with a progressive lung disease, according to many reports. This follows on earlier reports that she was prematurely aging, including developing arthritis. While one should be cautious about drawing conclusions from a single data point, its interesting to speculate." Here is a link to her birthplace courtesy of Captain Large Face

Comments

Re:Fiery the Angels fell

[Picass0]

Dolly: I... want... more... life, fucker!

Bladerunner

[theCat]

Many of you will recall that replicants had 4 years to live. It was built-in and they knew it and hated it.

I hate it when life immitates art, because some of our art is strange and the really good stuff is damn creepy. Dolly was cloned from a mature sheep, and the theory goes that she basically picked up where her...parent?...left off on the aging timeline. But that's not going to stop many wanna-be immortalists. So when some 80 y.o. geezer elects to have himself cloned the "new" baby will have the genetic signiture of an octagenarian, and probably 10 years to live a life of pain and senility.

This stuff sucks, people. You don't have to be a flaiming Bible thumper or a neoLuddite to be freaking out about Dolly. I think about how giddy everyone is about their personal fsckig immortality and my skin crawls.

Eat well, exercise, love someone with all your heart, have a good time. Have lots of great sex and leave a few really smart, well-adjusted children. Then go off and FUCKING DIE! OK? Just die and leave this earth to the next generation, born in the usual way with their own chance to live their own life their way, as nature had intended. Please!

Re:Bladerunner

[dissy]

Sigh, you totally missed my point.

> Cellular nuclei moving from mature adult mammalian
> somatic cells into unfertilized egg cells that
> have no nuclei of their own is not natural, it is
> in fact impossible without medical science

You are correct.
It is impossible without medical science.
Fortunatly medical science is very possible.
This means anything coming FROM medical science is also possible, and thus natural.

Nature is the container of all that we are in.
By the very fact cloning happens, means its playing by the rules of nature.

Just because it requires a human to do it is totally irrelivent.

Humans happen in nature too, thus we are possible (Fortunatly no one has argued that one yet)
Thus, anything we (being of nature) do, is natural as well.

I also find it funny you claim what i say is "pseudo religious nonsense" when in fact its most religons that argue the same point you are making, while science argues the point I am making.

Re:Bladerunner

[sjames]

The difference is, and almost everyone agrees, Humans have a soul, a consciousness, that is capable of interacting with nature in very unnatural ways.

The conversation is now leaving science and entering natural philosophy or religeon.

Continuing from that point, we cannot know the 'intent' of an anthropomorphised nature. Who is to say that the entire purpose of Darwinian evolution wasn't to create a species that was capable of directing further improvements intelligently? It may even be that the entire purpose of the human race is to create a machine race capable of directing it's own evolution ever more intelligently. Or perhaps to become that machine race itself.

Re:Oh boy...

[GreyPoopon]

Anti-cloning zealots are going to have a ball with this.

Yes, but if the rumors of premature aging are true, they may actually have some science to base their argument on. You see there's this very important substance called telomeres attached to the end of chromosomes. As cells divide, the telomere caps become shorter, and eventually the cells stop dividing and either malfunction or die. It stands to reason that, if you start off with an adult cell, you already have shortened telomeres and will therefore have a reduced lifespan. [Any biology experts should feel free to correct me.]

Rather than terminate Dolly, I'd rather they have experimented with telomerase to see if they could rejuvinate her. Although, I guess that's a little on the unethical and cruel side.

Re:I Know She'll Be Missed

[BeeShoo]

"Sheep are very loving animals"

Are you sure you don't want to rephrase that a bit? ;-)

The important thing is...

[ah.clem]

... that she existed at all. Without this research no one would have known that this was an issue with cloning. Imagine how much more we as humans would know if *all* research was unfettered by government regulation and/or religious superstition.

Re:First clone

[spiro_killglance]

Its more important than that, that fact clones aren't medically identical or as fit as the
orignal, tells us, that there is something we
don't know about genetics. Whatever it is, it
can cause premature aging and auto-immune disease,
that may well mean, that whatever we learn about
why clone are unfit, can produce cure for auto-immune diseases and maybe slow down aging.

Perphap the key to clones failure is methylization, the genes in cells can be selectly
switched on and off by attacting methyl group
to potions of the DNA, how this works, is controlled, and how/if its passed on, is very
important unknown of cell biology. In the same
way over half the DNA is a cell, is made up of
intron sequence that don't code for proteins or gene, however intron a preversed across millions
of years of evolution, human share many of the
same introns as mice. That means introns have to
be doing something important, but unknown. We've
much yet to learn about cellular biology and cloning as much to teach us.

DNA Aging, DNA Rejuvenating?

[PizzaFace]

If mature animals have "old" DNA, how do their offspring get "young" DNA?

I think of DNA aging as a process of random decay over time, but somehow my old DNA and my wife's old DNA can produce a baby with young DNA.

Does the combination of DNA during sexual reproduction clean up the strands from the parents? Or is something going on in their gonads to clean up their old DNA before packing it into gametes?

There's a biological process here that I haven't heard anyone describe, or even identify. And yes, I want to patent it.

Re:DNA Aging, DNA Rejuvenating?

[imnoteddy]

Your wife's old DNA does not produce a baby.

DNA from her eggs makes a baby.

All of the cells that develop into eggs are created in the
fetus, and then wait until puberty to develop into eggs.

Re:Average lifespan for a sheep...

[frank_adrian314159]

It might be interesting to know, though somewhat dusgusting to get to.

Not to be trollish, but why? It's a frickin' sheep, for God's sake. It's not like it wasn't going to eaten or put into dog food at the end anyway, right? Same for a million of them (or their genetic material which could easily be thrown down a drain or allowed to decompose). It might be a huge amount of effort (with 1,000,000 trials), but how one gets from that to disgusting, I don't see. Don't tell me - you didn't grow up in a farming community, huh?

Re:OT

[Bastian]

I agree that a lot of veggie groups are nuts. . .

but I agree with the McDonald's lawsuit. I'm veggie, and think that McDonald's attempted to decieve vegetarian customers. McDonald's had changed their ingredients list for their friench fries so that any mention of animal products was replaced by 'natural flavors' while leaving the beef products in. A lot of vegetarians and people who don't eat beef for religious reasons were duped into thinking that McDonald's fries were now safe to eat.

I think it's fair for McDonald's to be sensitive to such things.

Re:What speculation?

[p3d0]

Ok, so as long as you're not doing any speculating, then how does regular reproduction work? Re-read everything you just wrote and imagine you're talking about normal sexual reproduction. From that point of view, it's simply 100% incorrect.

Clearly there's more to genetics than you know.