MANY cloned animals may be born with crippled immune systems, a study of pigs suggests. The finding would explain why clones often die from infections soon after birth.
Jeff Carroll鈥檚 team at the US Department of Agriculture lab in Lubbock, Texas, injected nine 21-day-old clones and eleven non-cloned animals with a bacterial toxin and measured the resulting levels of small proteins in the blood that trigger the innate immune response.
The level of these proteins was far lower in many of the clones. 鈥淚n the past years, I鈥檝e looked at the immune response of hundreds of young pigs,鈥� says Carroll. 鈥淎nd I have never seen anything that low until I looked at a clone.鈥� The work has not yet been published.
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