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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
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
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.
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.