From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Oct 05 1999 - 10:40:23 MDT
The most astounding fact I picked up in my conversations with Dr Jack Cohen
(and then half lost, having no search facilities with me and not even a
notebook, so what follows is garbled and unreliable) is that Dolly came
from a batch of attempts in which Dr Wilmut tried to insert the telomerase
gene into the clones. Amazingly, all those embryos which incorporated
telomerase failed; Dolly's genome, however, proved *not* to have taken up
the gene.
I was agog at this. Cohen had got it from conversation with Wilmut, I
believe, although he said it had been published a few months ago in some
relatively obscure place. (I must be making that bit up - how could
anything Wilmut has to say about Dolly end up somewhere obscure?)
Anyway, this is all rather startling if correct. Might put a crimp in our
plans for Immortality Next Week.
Anyone with better net searching abilities than me should feel encouraged
to post more details.
Damien Broderick
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