Then, at age 5 — middle age, for a sheep living the good life in a research facility — Dolly developed osteoarthritis. In fact, four sheep clones formed from the same cell line as Dolly seem to be in perfect health and are now pushing nine years of age. They’ll investigate molecular aging in about a year, when the sheep — which will then have reached the truly impressive sheep age of 10, a milestone rarely seen in farm animals — are humanely put down. Now, a year later, one sheep is starting to exhibit signs of stiffness, but given their age, Sinclair said, it wouldn’t be unusual for one sheep out of four to have arthritis. Some worried that this meant clones would age prematurely, carrying the same biological clock as the adult cells they’d been created from.

Source: thestar July 27, 2016 21:33 UTC