A 20-year Japanese study that cloned a mouse through 58 generations found the animals gradually accumulated genetic mutations and eventually died shortly after birth, revealing a biological limit to repeated mammalian cloning.
Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.
A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.
The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.
“We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.