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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
Ya know, it was a good run for the first complex clone (mammal). I bet eventually they get the kinks worked out and cloned everything will be available. But for now, it's like the old addage: "in order to make an omlette, you have to break a few eggs."
is 10-14 years. Dolly lived to be 6+.
Not to draw any conclusions, but I don't think too many people will be taken back by this, unless of course you were one of the people who helped create Dolly and actually thought that she was completely normal.
Despite the fact I am against cloning, I would like to find out more results to this. What would the avg. lifespan be if there were 100 Dolly's (and I suppose 1,000,000 failed attempts as well). It might be interesting to know, though somewhat dusgusting to get to.
End result - this won't bode too well for cloning simply because Dolly developed this disease only half-way through her life. What will be much more interesting is to follow her child - I believe she gave birth to a female sheep in 1998 - 2 years after Dolly's birth.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
But the problem is that they have no idea what really did her in and what they did wrong. I really love the nuts that thinks the first time they try to clone a human it will work perfectly. Ha. About as likely as ... fill the blank... But seriously, it was a stroke of genious to think that when we can't figure out how protiens fold and what most of the junk inside cells do, that we could move some DNA around in a rather clumsy way and voila have a perfect clone. Next thing they are going to start talking about error free coding... yada yada yada. Dolly is dead and we don't have a clue and won't for a long long time. And when we do successful cloning we won't have a clue about what we did right, what we did wrong or what the difference is between the two.
Wait a minute...I'm an identical twin who is 24. Does this mean that I should look forward to Carousel soon? Or that I should start harvesting my clone's organ farm...?
There is good reason those zealots will have a ball with this. Shortly after Dolly was born lots of individuals familiar with the science had already predicted she'd suffer from advanced and premature aging. This has been the primary reason why the scientific community has wanted to forestall human cloning, since even when we get the successful clones they'll have decades hacked off their lives and be prone to numerous diseases seen primarily in geriatrics.
I fully support the use of cloning, both human and animal for whatever reasons, but only when we can first correct this very severe problem that exists in the process. The zealots, however, will use this legitimate ammo to get laws passed in a few years that will take decades, if not longer, to overturn. Thats why I oppose any mandatory bans on cloning research.
Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean that we SHOULD. I think that there are certain levels of morality that we as humans (and current stewards of Earth) must pay heed to. Cloning in and of itself is not a bad thing. Cloning of organs for human transplants is one aspect of this science that I am particularly for. This can reduce human suffering immeasurably. However, attempting to clone an entire being is at best a dangerous undertaking for which our scientific, religious, political, and legal communities are completely unprepared.
Your statement that "Cloning is natural. It happens, it (mostly) works. It doesnt fully work as we want it to, but either a) give us time, or b) it is indeed unnatural and you dont have to be the one to worry about it being impossible or not." is so far off the mark as to be quite comical. You seem to have confused the natural act of replication via sexual means with replication via asexual means, yet you then state that it is also unnatural and that we shouldn't worry about it.
Replicating via natural means as you state is natural. Replication by any other means is simply getting nature's way and a recipe for disaster. Hell, how can we as a human race undertake to create life when we can't even support the lives of other members of our race? I think that cloning a human is the most selfish act man could ever conceive. Nature thrives on diversity, which I think you would agree is natural. Cloning is an act of similarity, which I think you would have the wisdom to see as something unnatural in the scheme of things.
What about the risk with Genetic Engineering?
A genetic engineer takes a gene sequence, millions of bases long, changes a few and observes the results.
Imagine a hacker, taking a 10MB binary, disembling it by hand, randomly tinkering with a few bytes here and there, then looking for effects when they run it. Would you consider that app bug free?
if anything the hacker has an advantage, we can't write a DNA person, but we can write a machine code program.
Dolly's problems appeared in the first generation clone. But if no problems were observed after only a few generations of breeding from dolly it would have been declared safe.
In nature though, the changes are slow and small and the testing much much longer, and even then whole species become extinct when some weakness become apparent.
I reckon GE is a much bigger risk than cloning.
Ok, so every cell in your body goes through a process called mitosis. What Scientists have been doing so far is rip the nucleus out of a fertilized egg and replace it with the nucleus of a cell for the subject that is to be cloned. Well, as it may turn out, that cell has already gone the process of mitosis a number of times and each time its Telomeres(the end strands of DNA on a Chromosome) shorten. The funny thing is, all biological organisms have a way of repoducing already. In higher level organisms, such as mammals, this process is called meosis. Now every organism has number of chromosomes. Each chromosome comes with a homologous pair. When meosis takes place these pairs split in two. The thing about meosis is that we already know that the telomores are intact and don't cause premature aging. So instead of replacing the nucleus of a fertilized egg, why don't we take advantage of the process of meosis and with artifical insemination techinics, cause the subject to produce multiple eggs. The probobility that one set of the pair will end up in specific egg is 50:50. So if you have the subject produce multiple eggs, then it is quite likely that you will end up with an egg with one set of the pair and an egg with the other set. You take DNA from the egg with the other set, and you insert it into a sperm. Of course you would have to replicate it a number of times to have a successful insemination , but that wouldn't be anything we couldn't overcome with modern technology.
Either you are religious and hence you don't care about cloning.
Or you are an atheist. You might clone a person just like you, but it is you who still gets sick, grows old and eventually dies. You do not get to enjoy that body and everything that goes with it. So how does it matter you got a clone? Is it just the satisfaction of creating a person just like you? But isn't most (not all) of the procreation because of religious reasons!
The cells that produce the gametes are "immortalized" cells, constantly producing telomerase (see my Anonymous post a little further up regarding immortalized cells). Because of this, there offspring (the gametes) have the proper telomere length, minus maybe one generation's length. So the sexual reproduction iteself has really no bearing on it, though many of the early cells during development do express telomerase (otherwise you may have cells by the time that you get to your fingertips or other extremeties that are really old! :P)
Hope this give a little more clarification on why old parents don't necessarily have "old" DNA in their gametes.
It's actually a pretty important question, if you think about it, not even on the "at least give the sheep what it might want" sort of way. few examples:
* does cloned animals retain "normal" sexual apetite? (i.e. would a cloned panda be more, or possibly even less willing to fuck than the one's we've got right now?)
* If dolly does suffer from premature aging, would her offspring suffer the same thing? how would the offspring from a cloned animal be compared to an offspring of the source animal? (with the same "father," let's say)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Seems to me I recall a show on the discovery channel or in some backwater of a biology course I took that linked the degredation of telemer chains on the ends of chromosomes to the effects of aging. I wonder if perhaps taking the chromosomes from the original sheep, with depleted telemers, caused Dolly to age faster than a sheep with a newer supply. If anyone can substantiate this claim lemme know.
http://www.chrisbuck.com/archive2/index_dolly.h