Telomerase and human cloning. We all need to question the latest headlines about human cloning. Dr. Paul Shields and Dr. Ian Wilmut, in a letter to Nature, reported that Dolly has slightly stunted telomeres.
Telomeres are DNA strands at each end of a cell's DNA that become shorter with each cell division.
There has been speculation that telomeres are a sort of clock that tells cells it's time to stop dividing and die, but reality has not proven to be so simple. The researchers reported that Dolly's telomeres were 20 percent shorter than those of sheep who are not clones. To learn about telomeres is reason to proceed with cloning research, not abandon it. The Hawaii mouse experiment cloned successive generations of mice, partially to test the premature aging theory, and there were no signs of premature aging until the fifth generation of clones. The telomerase study is of only a few sheep including Dolly.