Dolly the Sheep Alive Again

SpeZek writes "Dolly the sheep has been reborn. Four clones have been made by the scientist behind the original research. The quads, which have been nicknamed 'the Dollies,' are exact genetic copies of their predecessor, who was put down seven years ago. The latest experiments were partly carried out to check if improvements to the technique cut the risk of problems in and out of the womb. Named after country and western singer Dolly Parton, Dolly was created from a cell taken from a mammary gland. The rest of the sample of tissue has lain in a freezer since, until it was defrosted to make the Dollies."

Comments

Dolly Parton

[Dan East]

Okay, is my mind totally in the gutter, or is there a significance to the mammary gland / Dolly Parton link?

Dolly is the new teacup?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious to know if Dolly will be the new teacup (used to test rendering algorithms) or Lenna (for image processing).

Will we be cloning the same sheep over and over again as a common reference?

A major "con" of cloning falls apart

[Myji Humoz]

From the article, the original Dolly was put down after about 6 years due to all kinds of medical conditions (infections, arthritis, etc). However, these four sheep are 3.5 years old, and are apparently in perfect health. A major argument against the use of cloned animals in animal husbandry (either cloning particularly tasty animals or using clones to breed) is that cloned animals end up in constant agony due to their origin.

Since these cloned animals appear just as comfortable and pain free as your "run of the mill" farm animal, it seems as if cloned animals can be just as humane to farm as normal animals. In fact, since the meat yield from each animal is much higher (by definition of selective cloning as the pinnacle of selective breeding), I would argue that using more cloned animals would reduce the ecological impact of the meat industry.

Ye average American Joe might not want to eat cloned meat, but clones are already breeding like mad to produce more productive offspring. Perhaps this new longitudinal study will give more insights on the ethics and health impacts of cloned meat.

Re:A major "con" of cloning falls apart

[Myji Humoz]

The article says that: "Animal welfare campaigners say that cloned animals and their surrogate mothers still suffer immensely."

The immune system argument is indeed the primary flaw of mass cloning, but our understanding of the role of genetics in forming an immune system is weak at best. However, we do know that immune systems aren't deterministic; genetic makeup X + environment Y doesn't always yield protection Z. As you said, the unsanitary conditions in factory farms induce tremendous suffering in the animals, but it also leads to a serious suppression of natural immune function. They are pretty much saturated in antibiotics from birth to slaughter to suppress infections; their natural immune system are essentially useless in those conditions. I'm purely speculating here, but what if a particular animal or animal line had an immune system that retained most of its function under terrible conditions? What if a particular animal displayed tremendous variability in initial antibody seeding?

It's tempting to think of animals as computer systems, where a single computer virus can easy take over identical systems with nearly identical ease. However, the immune system just doesn't work like that. To use a crude and somewhat misleading example, factory farms are like networks of computers running Windows XP with no service patch, no firewall, and no built in antivirus. However, every 4 hours, a godlike remote antivirus scan is run, and purges each system. If a virus or a bacterial strain is powerful enough to kill a line of Dollies, it's most likely strong enough to kill a line of sheep on the constant verge of death. Throw in antibiotic overuse, and it seems unlikely that there's a statistically significant risk increase between a factory full of Dollies and a factory full of randoms.

Piracy

[Degro]

So how long until the first genetic piracy article on Slashdot?

Re:I wonder how the pet resurrection is going

[Anonymous Coward]

(I'm not the same AC)

I think it's presumptive to assert that clones will have a different personality. I imagine that's quite possible, especially for those who adopted pets which were already mature (thus their personality was fully formed beforehand). However, I've had several cats from birth (because we had taken in the mother), and other cats and dogs right from weaning. Those animals developed their personalities under our care, and I suspect there would be a better than even chance that their clones' personalities would at least be very similar to original. I base that on the idea that whatever part of cat (or dog) personality is determined by genetics should be identical (barring cloning errors), and that the environment in which they would develop would be quite similar.

That said, I'd probably rather just take in strays/rescues, particularly given the likely ridiculous costs of pet cloning.

- T