A decision was taken to "euthanase" Dolly after an examination showed it had a progressive lung disease

Additional Reporting by Ahmad Maher, IOL Cairo Staff

PARIS, February 15 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – As a reminder of the dangers of cloning, the death of Dolly the sheep has reopened a heated debate on human cloning, not to mention on the ethics of the cloning process.

Dr. Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, the man who cloned the sheep, is himself one of the fiercest critics of human cloning.

He and other scientists say that in all likelihood the life of a cloned human baby would be brutally short or burdened with grim handicaps, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Friday, February 14.

Professor Richard Gardner, chair of the Royal Society working group on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, said the results of a post mortem would be essential to assessing any link between Dolly's death and the cloning process.

"If there is a link, it will provide further evidence of the dangers inherent in reproductive cloning and the irresponsibility of anybody who is trying to extend such work to humans," he spoke to BBC News Online.

Dr. Patrick Dixon, a writer on the ethics of human cloning, said the nature of Dolly's death would have a huge impact on the possibility of producing a cloned human baby.

"The greatest worry many scientists have is that human clones - even if they don't have monstrous abnormalities in the womb - will need hip replacements in their teenage years and perhaps develop senile dementia (decay of the mind) by their 20th birthday.

"This is why Dolly's health is so crucial and why scientists around the world will be waiting for the results of a post mortem examination on her," BBC News Online quoted him as saying.

This is also reflected in the extremely high number of miscarriages: as many as five out of six implanted cloned animal fetuses end in spontaneous abortion.

According to scientists, many cloned offspring die within the first 24 hours of birth from malformed heart, lungs and kidneys. Others, apparently healthy at birth, survive longer but then die suddenly.

Add to that, clones age prematurely because their DNA source is older.

"We can't rule out that Dolly's death was connected to her status as a clone," said Baroness Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the oldest independent research body in the world.

"We can't rule out that Dolly's death was connected to her status as a clone," said Greenfield

For his part, Dr. Abd Al-Hadi Mesbah, a visiting professor of genetics at Egyptian universities, told IslamOnline Saturday, February 15, that the case of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, was destined to fail from the very beginning, since old-age was very apparent in Dolly.

Noting that the average life expectance of the sheep is 10 years old, Mesbah said that Dolly was grown from a single udder cell removed from a 6-year-old ewe, adding that, on a genetic level, she seemed to have inherited those six years of age at birth.

"Scientifically speaking, the tips of the DNA strips of chromosomes, which typically shrink with age, inside her cells appeared to be shorter than usual, which meant that she had retained the aging genes of her mother," Mesbah said.

"The udder cell that was used to create Dolly had shortened telomeres (the physical ends of chromosomes), which is what they expected because the animal was 6 years old, ancient for a sheep," added the expert.

He also said Dolly has developed arthritis, which, no doubt, was caused by old age, asserting that it was hard evidence that her ailment was the result of her being a clone.

"She developed arthritis and I'm not surprised at all," said the genetics professor.

However, Mesbah said the idea of animal cloning was at the end of the day aiming at serving best the interest of humans, noting that scientists used it to increase the mammals' milk and meat.

He added that the fetus of a "natural" marriage between a ram and an ewe cannot acquire the gene responsible for increasing milk and meat, adding that it could only be acquired by implanting it in a cloned ewe.

Mesbah further raised the alarm on human cloning, asserting that the so-called Raelian group, which claimed the world's first cloned human, was only "showing off and flexing their muscles" to steal the limelight.

He warned that human cloning would only create disfigured and genetically flawed generations that would carry new unknown genes, which, in turn, could cause a new series of incurable and unprecedented diseases.

"It is a kind of scientific chaos," he said. 

Lab experience shows that some genes do not appear to switch on and off as they should at key phases - a huge problem in the complex ballet of making proteins, the material that comprises virtually all of the human body, Jerry Yang at the University of Connecticut told AFP.

She found that cloned cows had flaws in nine out of 10 genes studied on their X-chromosome - one of the two sex chromosomes (X and Y) that determine a mammal's gender.

Among the cloned cows, the flaws meant the copy of the X chromosome was incompletely switched off, she said.

In consequence, the cow's protein-making machinery went haywire, with catastrophic results for the animal's survival.

A post mortem will now be carried out to tell whether the incurable lung disease that Dolly contracted was a result of her being cloned, noted Yang.

Cloned on 5 July 1996, Dolly's death was announced by the Roslin Institute, which decided the sheep should be put down after she developed a progressive lung disease.