X-rays of the bones of Dolly the sheep, her daughter and two other cloned sheep showed that they did not suffer from osteoarthritis and other forms of senile disease and did not age abnormally quickly, according to an article published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The results of our experiments, which we published last year, contradicted the conventional wisdom that Dolly developed osteoarthritis due to the fact that clones age faster than normal animals. We drew attention to the fact that no one really comprehensively studied the history of her disease, and tried to correct this defect, - said Kevin Sinclair (Kevin Sinclair) from the University of Nottingham (UK).
The most famous sheep in the world, Dolly, was born in the laboratories of the Roslin Institute in July 1996 as the result of the world's first experiment to grow a clone of an animal from adult cells. Dolly lived a rather short life for a sheep - only 6.5 years - and died in 2003 from osteoarthritis, which led many opponents of cloning to say that this process leads to irreversible disruptions in the body's work and leads to accelerated aging of the clone.
Last year, Sinclair and his colleagues proved in practice that such claims are not true, creating four clones of Dolly the sheep from her mammary gland cells, as well as nine other clones, none of which have died or seriously ill.
The successful completion of these experiments led British geneticists to question whether Dolly's claims of osteoarthritis were based on sound scientific evidence. They tested the findings of colleagues by illuminating the bones of Dolly, her daughter Bonnie, and the other two first cloned sheep, Megan and Morag, using X-rays.
After receiving these photographs, the scientists passed them on to three leading veterinarians and osteoarthritis specialists, asking them to assess the condition of the sheep's joints. No expert, as Sinclair emphasizes, initially knew who the photographs belonged to and why the geneticists studied them, and therefore their sympathies or dislikes towards Dolly and other cloned animals should not have influenced their conclusions.
“As shown by our analysis, the number and distribution pattern of foci of osteoarthritis in the bones of clones was the same as in“normal”sheep of the same age. This suggests that claims that cloning accelerated the aging of the sheep and led to the development of osteoarthritis are not true,”added Sandra Korr of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, one of the veterinarians who examined sheep bones.
How this false idea arose and how it spread throughout the scientific and social environment, most likely, will be one of those mysteries that historians will have to solve. As Sinclair notes, there is only one mention in the scientific literature that Dolly suffered from severe forms of osteoarthritis, and it is contained not even in the article, but in the abstracts for the conference.
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Scientists conclude that no specific data on the basis of which such a conclusion was made was published, which significantly complicates the search for the roots of this erroneous theory, its possible "authors" and determination of the motives for their actions.
