One of the things I remember about Dolly the cloned sheep is that,
while they able to reset the sequence of events in the genes and grow
her up from cells of her mother, they started with cells of a specific
age, as measured by the telomere length, so dolly, even as a "baby"
sheep, was subject to the same age related problems as her mother,
since her cells were biologically the same age. They were not able to
reset the clock built into the genes but only restart the sequence.

Go ahead, go there...

Rob Halgren wrote in message ...
This isn't my specialty either, but if this does happen, it is
probably a function of telomere length. The telomeres are repetitive
sequence at the end of each chromosome. Due to the way DNA replication
works, you lose a little bit of telomere with every cell division. So,
the sorter the telomeres, the older the organism. Neat... I think this
is one of the more prevalent hypotheses about how the aging function
works. There is probably also a contribution from DNA damage, your DNA
accumulates various mutations and damage over time, and there are
proteins which sense this. Next you are going to ask me how everything
gets reset to 'normal' in the next generation... I don't really want to
go there.

You learn all sorts of things from an orchid newsgroup... *grin*

Rob