Keysh

From the linked Washington Post story: "The cloned animals were made by injecting one of Willa’s cells into an egg from a domesticated ferret."

Which is kind of interesting, because domesticated ferrets are a different species. (I wonder if this means the clones have mitochondrial DNA from the domesticated ferret egg.)

MrMcCall

I'm curious how many defects creep into the process. I doubt the scientists have any idea, and I'm pretty sure the process involves a great deal of statistical inference to reconstruct the genome from many, many small chunks of DNA.

How would they even measure their accuracy? By definition, there's not even a baseline to measure against, right?

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Mistletoe

I’m ignorant about cloning progress made since Dolly. Have they made advances on the problem where the clones have accelerated aging because they are made from cells that are aged?

>On 14 February 2003, Dolly was euthanised because she had a progressive lung disease and severe arthritis.[6] A Finn Dorset such as Dolly has a life expectancy of around 11 to 12 years, but Dolly lived 6.5 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

Or was it even a problem at all? It seems clones made later haven’t had that issue? It shows the power of a meme in installing that idea in the consciousness of society.

Google is telling me this in its AI answer.

>Research suggests that telomeres are rejuvenated during nuclear reprogramming by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

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