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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
Hello Lamb Chops !!!
This is the best thing about cloning. An endless supply of lamb chops !!!
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
"While one should be cautious about drawing conclusions from a single data point, its interesting to speculate."
It's obviously a sign from above...
There is nothing sadder for a parent than having to burry their clone....
Somehow that just did not sound right.
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."
This follows on earlier reports that she was prematurely aging, including developing arthritis.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy-- um, I mean Dolly.
I write in my journal
"We had to put her to sleep," they said sheepishly. "She was in shear agony. There was mutton we could do about it."
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
It wasn't cloning that got her lungs - it was secondary cigarette smoke from the black sheep of the family.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
Although the shortening of her telomeres is well-publicized, it very well may have had nothing to do with the death. A somewhat more detailed story can be found here [Reuters].
Remember, Blade Runner (and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) had such first...
In fact, isn't it a bit ironic that a sheep is prematurely aging, versus the mechanical fake sheep (and title) in Philip K. Dick's novel?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
this is good...
i was all set to make believe i saw ufos so i could join up with the raelians. i don't know how long i could have maintained that lie. but since these are the only folks who will cut off the head of my clone and put my brain in his shell, what can a craven mortal do?
since it looks like all this cloning stuff won't give me unlimited life yet, now i don't have to maintain the charade.
i'm going to tell those raelians the truth and give them a piece of my mind!
oh wait, er...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That'll do.
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
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!
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
They don't know how many sheep they've actually cloned, you know. They tried counting the sheep, but they fell asleep...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
More than one data point. Dolly is actually the second cloned sheep to die in a week. Matilda, a cloned sheep born in the year 2000 in Australia died last week. Autopsy results were inconclusive. Matilda's passing.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
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
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Sheep are very loving animals.
Aye son, ye cannae deny tha'.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - the cutting edge cloned mammal Dolly was found dead in her Maine home this morning. There weren't any details. I'm sure we'll all miss her, even if you weren't a fan of her creators' work there's no denying her contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"Sheep are very loving animals"
;-)
Are you sure you don't want to rephrase that a bit?
... 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.
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
Only in more, er, "rural" parts of the UK... which Scotland counts as!
Everyone, lock up your sheep, they've become sensitized to the sound of a fly unzipping so sales of velcro-fastened trousers have skyrocketed!
-Mark
[homer]
Mmmmm... la-a-amb... *drool*
[/homer]
Sorry - I don't know how to spell the 'raaghchchgh' Homer makes at drool time. D'oh.
(Yes, I know 'bury' was misspelled, but 'cury' just wouldn't have worked.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
Baa, baa, baa!
TRANSLATION:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Lab rats examined by laboratory technicians. I watched hay pour into my trough like a golden rain of food. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. Oh, and uh, it's painful to live in fear, isn't it?
I'm the stranger...posting to
This may just be my opinion, but instead of wasting time cloning animals, scientists should be figuring out how to transplant brains into robotic bodies. Being able to live forever as a cyborg is far more important to me then having a clone of myself which will just grow old and pathetic.
I Love Alberta Beef
President George Bush is visiting an elementary school and enters one of the classes. They are in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings. The teacher asks the President if he would like to lead the class in the discussion of the word, "tragedy." So the illustrious leader asks the class for an example of a "tragedy." One little boy stands up and offers, "If my best friend, who lives next door, is playing in the street and a car comes along and runs him over, that would be a tragedy." "No," says Bush, "that would be an ACCIDENT." A little girl raises her hand: "If a school bus carrying 50 children drove off a cliff, killing everyone involved, that would be a tragedy." "I'm afraid not," explains Mr. President. "That's what we would call a GREAT LOSS." The room goes silent. No other children volunteer. President Bush searches the room. "Isn't there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?" Finally, way in the back of the room, a small boy raises his hand. In a quiet voice he says, "If Air Force One, carrying Mr.Bush and Mrs.Bush, were struck by a missile and blown up to smithereens, by a terrorist like Osam bin Laden, that would be a tragedy." "Fantastic," exclaims Bush, "that's right. And can you tell me WHY that would be a TRAGEDY?" "Well," says the boy, "because it wouldn't be an accident, and it certainly wouldn't be a great loss."
No. They are going to have mint jelly with this.
A little song, a little dance
A little seltzer down the pants!
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.
Your telomere explanation was pretty good, except that telomeres aren't just any substance. They're DNA. The end of a chromosome has short repeating sequences of a few base pairs (ex: AATTAATT, etc.) which are not all replicated when a cell duplicates its genome and divides. This presumably acts as a molecular "clock" for the organism to keep track of its "age," but this is pretty controversial and unsubstantiated.
Click here to read more about telomeres. (Why don't more people link to Wiki?)
Even if this telomere function were well-established, it doesn't entirely explain the aging process. It seems that part of the process is due to oxidative damage caused by radical reactions in the mitochondria. But similar reactions happen in chloroplasts and some plants live for millenia!The exciting thing about biology is that you reach the frontiers of knowledge in the field during your first year of introductory undergraduate coursework. In math you reach the frontiers maybe by your fourth year or in grad school. For physics and chemistry, somewhere in between. Biology is full of unexplained phenomena. If you want to make a great fundamental discovery in one of the hard sciences, then become a biologist. So much is unknown!
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...?
If you want to make a great fundamental discovery in one of the hard sciences, then become a biologist. So much is unknown!
There are more chicks too.
Hello, Obscurity!
In the upper midwest they are referred to as "Montana Blondes"
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.
Ahh, Scotland - where the men are men, and the sheep are nervous.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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.
They can't. That would be a violation of the DMCA.
Clearly there's more to genetics than you know.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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.
Telomeres are repeating sequences of non-protein-coding DNA at the end of a chromosome. Due to an inefficiency involoved in the replication of chromosomes, they become shorter and shorter with each cell division. Eventually, the telomere is depleted and parts of actual genes begin to be cut off. This explains death by old age.
An interesting side note is that cancer cells do not undergo the shortening of telemeres unlike normal cells. As opposed to normal cells which have a finite lifetime, cancer cells are functionally immortal.
A little off topic, but still somewhat interesting.
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.
Telomeres are not so much a substance as a sequence of base pairs located at the ends of chromosomes. They're important because the enzymes used to copy these chromosomes during cell divison can't quite go all the way to the end. In theory this means that there must be a maximum number of replications a cell can go thorugh before you start to loose important information off the end of the DNA molecule.
Some people have speculated that this may be an important cause of aging but I've never seen completely convincing research to support this. Cells do have enzymes called telomerases which can reconstitute these terminal sequences but they do shorten with each generation of cells. The whole effect is complicated.
As to using telemerase to treat Dolly - whatever the effect of telemeres is on aging, Dolly died of a "lung infection" so I don't think her chromosomes were directly to blame.
David
Please, for the love of God, stay off the dunes.
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.
It wasn't that Dolly was a clone. Dolly was kept indoors with a bunch of other sheep (some clones, some not) and this virus was spreading in the whole population. It doesn't sound like the disease was directly related to her being a clone.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It is my understanding (which doesn't mean too much) that telomeres weren't so much a clock as a failsafe. When chromosomes replicate a little genetic information tends to be lost during this dividing process. Telomeres are "spare" genetic material at the ends of the chromosome, so they get cut off first. When the chromosomes in a certain cell have no telomere left, the cell cannot successfully divide.
The telomeric shortening results in the 'Hayflic Limit' where mamalian cells in culture are observed to divide 50-80 times before killing themselfs, telomeric shortening is linked to this process, prehaps providing some sort of timer as to when to kill off the cell in order to prevent conditions such as cancer.
While the telomere exists as a protection against genetic instability arising from CRISIS, I think that ascribing it a role in 'aging' is a bit of a jump. I am much more comfortable with the idea that Telomeres act to help prevent genetic instability due to the problems associated with replication of linear chromasones. While the Telomere acts as a 'molecualr clock' of sorts, it is only really concerned with the cells DNA, aging in other ways (such as progressive modifications in collagen with increased age) is nothing to do with Teleomers.
As to the point on the aging process itself, i would argue that it is entirely independent of telomeric shortening, and that change in telomeric length is *just* a timer indicating the age of the cell/number of divisions to reach its current condition. The aging process is due to a large number of ancillary effects which have no relationship to the telomeres.
And yes, biology (or in this case, not to nitpick, genetics) is one of the places where you find yourself with the cutting edge stuff very early on. Makes for really interesting study, if a bit annoying that no text book you can buy is up to date enough.
Looks like someone left a bug in Dolly's overloaded operator=
Wrong for two reasons:
1. Genetic engineering is not "random". A better comparison would be a hacker taking 10MB of source code to some random program and adding an email client. (hey, like Emacs!)
2. The genetic code can handle quite a bit of "random" mutation. There are cases where it is extremely sensitive to mutation, such as sickle-cell leukemia (single poylmorphisim that causes hemoglobin to form chains), but there are "silent" mutations and even amino acid mutations that will have no effect.
Even if this telomere function were well-established, it doesn't entirely explain the aging process. It seems that part of the process is due to oxidative damage caused by radical reactions in the mitochondria. But similar reactions happen in chloroplasts and some plants live for millenia!
Aging is a tough problem to solve. It appears that cell reproduction errors build up over the life-time of an organism. Many of the symptoms of aging are the slowing of metabolism to reduce the chances of mistakes. If an organism is tweaked to bypass this slowdown, then cancer and similar deseases will probably end you because errors occure more often when metabolism is turned up high.
Thus, aging is a balance between a rock (slower metabolism) and a hard place (cancer).
The closest analogy that comes to mind is the basketball season. If a team plays too hard mid-season, they may have too many injuries by the time the playoffs come. And, if they don't play hard enough, they won't make it to (win enough games for) the playoffs.
Perhaps the best solution against human aging would be to slow the body's metabolism, but not the brain's. Modern living usually requires less physical exertion than our body is tuned for.
Table-ized A.I.