Here is an excerpt from a recent article about Dolly the cloned sheep, if you missed it.
>>>>>Dolly: 'A Sheep in Lamb's Clothing' Clones Inherit Age With Genes, Studies Show By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, May 27, 1999; Page A01
Bad news for people who had hoped that cloning might allow them to create more youthful copies of themselves: The first molecular studies ever conducted on Dolly, the 3-year-old sheep cloned from a 6-year-old ewe, have found that Dolly's cells are, in essence, at least 9 years old.
The surprising results suggest that clones somehow inherit not only the genes, but in some respects the age, of the animals from which they are made.
"It sounds like the worst of our fantasies about cloning, combining the inexperience of youth with the biology of the aged," said Thomas H. Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y.-based ethics think tank and a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission that prepared a report on human cloning for President Clinton in 1997.
Scientists said they were fascinated by the findings, which raise intriguing scientific and philosophical questions about the genetics of aging, the relationship between biological and chronological time, and what it means to be "old."<<<<<
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