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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
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.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
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.