Dolly and her first born lamb Bonnie. Courtesy Roslin Institute.
If you're a sheep, you don't expect arthritis -- a progressive degeneration of bones and joints -- at a mere five years of age. And yet that's what's happened to Dolly, the first mammal made by nuclear transfer, commonly called cloning.
Several weeks ago, the famed' photogenic freak of
the lab started hobbling, acting far older than her age. Ian Wilmut, who
oversaw Dolly's cloning for the
Roslin Institute, admitted that he's considering euthanasia for the lame
sheep.
"Dolly's well-being is paramount and we must ensure she has a pain-free existence," Wilmut told a newspaper (see "Dolly: The Sheep's Creator" in the bibliography). But before Dolly breezes off into the great lea in the sky, it would be nice to know whether her arthritis is a fluke, or a sign that her genetic material somehow aged before or during the cloning process.
If, after all, nuclear transfer yields pre-aged cells or tissues, it would lose its luster. But the case is not closed. "That's the most ridiculous, overblown thing the media has done," says Randall Prather, a professor of reproductive biotechnology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, who has cloned transgenic pigs. "It's an N of one [an experiment with one subject]. Did they bother to ask if her clone got arthritis at the same age?"
And a recent report in Science magazine: (see "Cloned Cattle" in the bibliography) found few differences among 24 surviving cloned calves. While some of the clones had respiratory problems at birth, "We did not observe genetic defects, immune deficiencies, gross obesity, or other drastic abnormalities cited by other researchers," wrote Robert Lanza, vice-president of medical and scientific development at the cloning company Advanced Cell Technology.
One thing's for sure. Our cloning bibliography is cooking on every gene.
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