Al wrote:

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.



Ok, I'll go there. There is a critter called telomerase which adds
telomere repeats to the ends of chromosomes. In the real world, it is
only expressed in a very limited set of cells, for a very limited time.
So your germ cells may have this enzyme turned on, but your skin cells
won't. In fact, turning on telomerase activity in somatic (body) cells
has been associated with cancer progression. So, since Dolly was cloned
from a somatic cell (I don't know which kind), the poor little ewe
started out with shorter telomeres than she should have.

So, we could turn telomerase back on in all your cells... This
might make your cells 'young' again. However, you would get terrible
cancers and die. So that isn't really the answer now, is it? *grin*

Rob

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