When dolly the sheep was cloned does it have the same dna of the age of the sheep?
This is unclear. Dolly didn’t *seem* to age faster than normal – and she died of a common lung complaint (a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte), which domesticated sheep often suffer from. The breed of sheep Dolly was – Finn Dorset – normally live to 12 to 15 years old, and Dolly died age 6. The intensive necropsy conducted after her death also did not reveal any signs of premature ageing. But it is still possible that prematurely-short telomeres were a contributing factor to her contracting the cancer. Telomeres are regions of non-coding (“junk”) DNA at the ends of chromosomes. Normally, due to a side-effect of the process of DNA replication, these get shortened every cell division. Eventually, the telomeres are “used up”, and the DNA shortening starts to eat into actual genes. This causes the cell to become less able to perform certain tasks, and can also cause cancer. The Jaagsiekte lung cancer, however, is caused by a virus (retrovirus JSRV). In germ-line cells, such as those th
