MANY cloned animals may be born with crippled immune systems, a study of pigs suggests. The finding would explain why clones often die from infections soon after birth.
Jeff Carroll’s team at the US Department of Agriculture lab in Lubbock, Texas, injected nine 21-day-old clones and eleven non-cloned animals with a bacterial toxin and measured the resulting levels of small proteins in the blood that trigger the innate immune response.
The level of these proteins was far lower in many of the clones. “In the past years, I’ve looked at the immune response of hundreds of young pigs,” says Carroll.…
