Word: lambing
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...years ago this week, on a warm July night, that a newborn lamb with an unique pedigree took her first breath in a small shed tucked in the Scottish hills a few miles south of Edinburgh. From the outside, she looked no different from thousands of other sheep born each summer on surrounding farms. But Dolly, as the world soon came to realize, was no ordinary lamb. She was cloned from a single mammary cell of an adult ewe, overturning long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible. Her birth set off a race in laboratories...
...decade later, scientists are starting to come to grips with just how different Dolly was. Dozens of animals have been cloned since that first little lamb--mice, cats, cows, pigs, horses and, most recently, a dog--and it's becoming increasingly clear that they are all, in one way or another, defective...
...serve as a biological clock chronicling a cell's age. In general, the shorter the telomeres, the older the cell. Dolly, a clone of a 6-year-old ewe, had cells whose telomeres were closer in length to those of her biological mother than to those of a baby lamb. We will never know, though, whether her shortened telomeres would have shortened her life. In 2003 Wilmut and his team decided to put Dolly to sleep after she developed lung cancer caused by a viral infection common among sheep. An autopsy revealed that she was otherwise normal...
...were very worried. We had one chance, one lamb, and previous experiments showed that the chances of having a healthy lamb were very small. That was the reason why I wasn't there [at the birth]. I was determined that the ewe should not be disturbed by having a lot of people around. These sheep are used to living life on a hill, and until they were brought in for the studies, they probably saw people only six times a year. Being near people could still be a frightening experience for them, so the sensible thing...
...spoiled. On the hill farms where I live, if a lamb is orphaned, it's taken inside, sometimes even into the house, and hand fed by the farmer?s wife. So the lambs get used to people, and a lamb like that will come toward people because they are a source of food. Dolly had a similar situation; she did see a lot of people, an awful lot more than most sheep. And because we wanted her in a particular place to be photographed, she was often given extra food. So she got different by being spoiled and getting...