Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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].
The main suspected "kink" are the telomeres, and if we do discover it's a kink, it may be a difficult one to work around. Here's a good article on telomeres and telomerase.
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
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.
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"?
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.
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
No. They are going to have mint jelly with this.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.