X-Message-Number: 9000
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 09:43:21 -0800 (PST)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Immortal Human Cells

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Reports of the death of the telomerase theory of aging have been greatly 
exaggerated. I think this is the biggest news since Dolly, and speaking of 
Dolly, there is a very obvious experiment that I'm sure somebody has thought 
of and already started.

Take a gene for telomerase production and a gene to turn it on and insert 
them into a sheep cell. With present techniques when you insert a gene into a 
cell it almost never finds its way to the correct place on the chromosome and 
gets expressed properly. It may take millions or billions of attempts before 
everything works correctly, but you can put trillions of cells in a test tube 
and if you also include a signaling gene for antibiotic resistance or for 
the production of a small amount of florescent dye, you can find the one 
successful cell out of billions. Then you use that cell to make a clone and 
observe if you get a cancerous sheep, an immortal sheep, or no sheep at all. 
Whatever the results of this experiment it will give us a profound lesson in 
how life works. We live in exciting times.        

                                              John K Clark     

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.i

iQCzAgUBNLz1Qn03wfSpid95AQEpbATuJrX6SPyzDKZOjysntjChuP9WpLSg96Xi
hso2o9HPkwsLOE8kf+02eI/NoaFlK4yTc/j0RDxBsshltk/mNhVyLTZFP0G3rggV
112IheuyB1yH2yxN9e1KJUHamubQwhJOCC9ZozHLcnD015b3SOMXOYPsZ31B7iWf
fZb57t8rYmkO3dYw1OOyy1N3EcUEiFiAFBVsgm1FlKmbMMn4Dlo=5Ja2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9000