CLONING doesn’t necessarily make cells grow old, and can even act as a
fountain of youth, say researchers who have been investigating a group of cloned
calves. The news comes a year after a study on Dolly the cloned sheep showed
that her cells appeared prematurely old. That finding raised fears that cloned
animals or future medical treatments based on cloned cells would turn out to be
short-lived.
Concerns over cellular ageing in clones centres around telomeres, regions of
DNA at the ends of chromosomes which shorten every time a cell divides.
Telomeres appear to shrink throughout our lives, and…
