29 April 2002
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All clones defective: Dolly creator
From The Sunday Times' Jonathan Leake in the UK
29apr02
A REVIEW of all the world's cloned animals suggests every one of them is genetically and physically defective.
Ian Wilmut, co-creator of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, published his findings this weekend and suggested cloned humans could be vulnerable to genetic defects.
This was a clear warning that "nobody should be attempting to clone a child".
In Italy, Severino Antinori has claimed three women are pregnant with cloned babies, and in the US , Panayiotis Zavos has said he will achieve such a pregnancy within two years.
The new study surveys cloning efforts worldwide. "The widespread problems associated with clones has led to questions as to whether any clone was entirely normal," Professor Wilmut says.
Dolly, the sheep cloned by Professor Wilmut five years ago at the Roslin research centre in Scotland, has already shown defects.
Earlier this year, Dolly was found to be developing arthritis at a far younger age than is normal in sheep.
Professor Wilmut lists defects occurring regularly in other cloned animals, including gigantism (excessive size) in cloned sheep and cattle, placentas up to four times the normal size in mice and heart defects in pigs.
Despite being given normal amounts of food, many cloned mice also become grotesquely fat, while many cloned cows, sheep and pigs have developmental difficulties, lung problems and malfunctioning immune systems.
Cloned animals have also shown a variety of individual defects. A calf cloned in France appeared to be thriving but suddenly died at 51 days old after a failure in its ability to produce white blood cells.
Scientists at Roslin had to put down a cloned lamb at 12 days old because the muscles around its lungs were so abnormally thick that it could hardly breathe.
Professor Wilmut believes DNA is formatted radically differently in the cloning process and this is why the genes of cloned animals seem to behave in unpredictable ways.
He concludes: "There is abundant evidence that cloning can and does go wrong and no justification for believing that this will not happen with humans."
The researchers behind the human cloning programs said they could overcome such problems. Dr Zavos claims to have two laboratories perfecting their techniques on animals before attempting to reproduce a human in the "near future".
The Australian
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