Clones can reproduce! (cloned kittens in new orleans)

[Bhaisahab]

Clones can reproduce!

Posted online: Monday, August 22, 2005 at 1342 hours IST

Washington, August 22: And then there were eight...

In what is seen here as another breakthrough for bio-engineering, three cloned African wildcats living in the United States have produced two healthy litters of kittens, demonstrating for the first time that clones of wild animals can breed.

The successful experiment, unveiled by the Audubon Centre for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans, Louisiana, over the weekend, appeared to open the way to bringing severely endangered species back from the brink of extinction, scientists said.

But it also raised the question if Jurassic Park, a fictional nature preserve teaming with cloned dinosaurs and velociraptors invented by popular novelist Michael Crichton and popularised in a blockbuster 1993 movie, was getting closer to becoming a reality.

continued: http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=53163

[wli]

1. not very interesting

Clones are equivalent to normal organisms. There's nothing that would stop them from reproducing or other such activity.

It won't take much reading to get to where this is obvious.

[SoCalDem]

2. However

if the cloned animal was a female, nearing the end of reproduction years, the eggs could be suspect..and wouldn;t the cloned animal, even though newborn, have the same "biologically aged" eggs??

:shrug:

(I admit to being old..studied biology last in 1968)

[oscar111]

3. Calif.: if you mean the offspring might have aged eggs, no

during residence in the enucleated egg's envelope, the inserted donor somatic DNA ,

is "rewound" to embryonic age-state.

This rewinding is being looked at as a source of young DNA which can then be trucked .. by benign viral truck... into every cell of an adult.. like yourself... to slowly remorph your own body to a newborn state of age. Repeat in seventy yrs for serial immortality.

The entrepreneur.. hate the word.. who ripped off the Nat'l Genome project to jump in and beat it to the finish line, is looking at this task. Forget his name. Something like "refrigerator" Anyone?

[SoCalDem]

4. eew. that's creepy

Thnaks for the info :hi:

[dutchdoctor]

5. Craig Venter?

entrepreneur, reminds of something George W Bush has been alleged to say: "Too bad the french don't have a word for entrepreneur"

[oscar111]

9. Venter it is.

misrecalled a Vending Machine as a fridge LOL

[Tesha]

8. Actually, that's not so certain.

Google for "telomeres clones".

Tesha

[oscar111]

11. clones.. not heard of shorter lives as a rule

some cloned by poor methods have internal organ problems.. esp a run of monkeys that got a lot of press... but by good methods, i have not heard any lament about shorter lives.

telomeres are intriguing, but not the entire cause of aging it seems. Might be wrong on that, as i now give only one ear to cloning news. your point is a good one. Stay tuned.

I was thinking actually of how normal sperm-egg genesis, results in a superb re-winding of DNA, so it reflects none of the age decay of parents. A goal for us all to shoot for, in treatment of adult's 3 trillion cell DNA's so they can live longer.

In theory cloning by good methods {there are oodles of methods now, even some involving two-nuclei eggs}... will imitate the superb rewind of DNA seen in normal sperm-egg genesis {oogenesis? nice word}. This is a new science, give it time and problems will be worked out. Recall how the Hayflick Limit fell away in pieces? LOL. Good riddance. And the Sound Barrier?

[wli]

13. it's tough to damage it in a way it remains viable

Which is part of the reason why it's rare and/or unexpected to see the effects of damaging during extraction.

[xchrom]

6. i don't have huge problem with cloning -- it's the uses

i have a problem with.

i think it's cool that the cats can reproduce -- it just shows complexity -- and all the more reason not to use clones for things like body part replacement.

[fasttense]

7. I haven't been following cloning science lately, have they been able to

clone a male yet???

[Cult]

10. I thought they cloned males a while ago.....

Maybe I just need to stay more on top of these things.

-E!

[oscar111]

12. welcome cult to DU! Males , yes , cloned

in scifi, clones with the dna for the forebrain removed are grown as replacements for one's entire body. The aged human's forebrain is then transplanted into the clone, which then gains awareness.
The aged patient gains seventy years of life, each time this is done, and in scifi it is done forever afterward.

comments?