In the end, after a physical examination and bone age test, only thirty-three of the fifty old men met the requirements for the experiment.
The remaining seventeen who did not meet the requirements were naturally sent back.
It was fortunate that Gorob Village was able to find so many people over the age of fifty. It was said that the village chief even went to a neighboring village to negotiate with people to make up the numbers.
The reason for the scarcity of the elderly was due to the poor medical standards. It was fine in the cities and towns, but there were not many people in the villages who could live past the age of fifty.
Namibian officials have done statistics, in this country, more than 10% of children are orphans, because these children were born to parents who died of AIDS shortly after giving birth to them.
In Namibia, the national population was only 2.58 million, but the HIV infection rate was 21.3%. This meant that one-fifth of the people in this country were HIV carriers.
Fortunately, the HIV infection rate in Namibia was not too high in Africa. It was far lower than Botswana's 37.3%, Swaziland's 38.8%, and Lesotho's 28.9%...
Africa had two world-famous specialties. One was diamonds, and the other was AIDS.
Ignoring the dissatisfaction of the villagers in Gorob Village, Chen Chen had the thirty-three people take a shower, then arranged for them to stay in the basement. They were provided with delicious food and drinks, but their area of activity was restricted.
At the same time, in the laboratory, Chen Chen recruited a group of experienced assistants and began cloning the cloned human embryos of these old men.
For the specific procedure, Chen Chen used a more advanced three-dimensional polarized light spindle imaging system. After locating the nucleus of the egg cell, he punched a hole in the zona pellucida with a laser and removed the nucleus in a way that would not cause any damage to the egg cell. After that, he used a micromanipulator to implant the somatic cell nucleus of the old men.
Unfortunately, the technology of this group could not compare to Chen Chen at all. They failed several times along the way. They also failed several times in the process of using electric current and chemical induction. In the end, all the cloned embryos were completed under Chen Chen's guidance.
Next, this batch of cloned embryos needed 14 days to grow to the blastocyst stage, then the embryonic stem cells inside would be extracted.
The international opposition to human embryo cloning was in fact opposed to this step. To some people, killing these fertilized eggs was equivalent to murder, which was ethically unacceptable.
Fortunately, these objections did not pose too much of a hindrance to the research of cloned embryos. So far, the technology of embryonic stem cell cloning was still making great strides forward.
After the embryonic stem cells were extracted, the embryonic stem cells could be differentiated into the required hematopoietic stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells by controlling the growth environment of the embryonic stem cells and manipulating the expression of specific genes.
The stem cells cloned through this method were almost identical to the genes of the elderly. There would not be any rejection reaction, and they were stem cells in the prime of life.
After these elderly people underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy, they would be implanted into their bodies to replace the aging stem cells in their bodies.
Once these young hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells returned to the bone marrow, they would quickly differentiate into blood cells, muscle cells, liver cells, osteoblasts, fat cells, chondrocytes, stroma, and other human cells to repair and improve the damage caused by aging.
This was the function of stem cells.
However, for a period of time, the academic community had been caught in a huge misunderstanding. This misunderstanding was fermented by the earliest case of Dolly the cloned sheep —
As everyone knew, the cloned sheep, Dolly, was the world's first artificially cloned animal. Before Dolly was born, its donor was a Dorset white-faced sheep from Finland. The experimenter extracted the mammary gland cells from the sheep and then removed the cell nucleus from it to clone Dolly. In other words, Dolly's genes were basically the same as this Dorset white-faced sheep.
The Dorset white-faced sheep in Finland was six years old when the mammary gland cells were extracted.
However, after the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, people found that Dolly's telomeres were shorter than those of sheep of the same age. Not only that, Dolly the cloned sheep showed signs of premature aging at the age of six. Although people took good care of it, Dolly eventually died.
In the same year, the Dorset white-faced sheep, the donor of Dolly the cloned sheep, also died of old age at the age of twelve.
In the study of lifespan in the biological community, the more mainstream theories were the "telomere theory" and the "free radical theory". Both had not been thoroughly confirmed, but if telomeres were the key factor affecting lifespan, then the death of Dolly the cloned sheep seemed to have a basis.
Because the nucleus donor of Dolly the cloned sheep was a six-year-old sheep, so although Dolly the cloned sheep was just born, the length of its telomeres had been worn down to only six years of life? That was why it died at the same time as the donor after six years?
This misunderstanding affected the entire academic community back then, casting a shadow over the entire cloning technology because if this conclusion was true, it meant that most of the treatment methods developed by cloning technology were futile. This was because no matter how much cloning was done, the length of the telomeres would never change...
This misunderstanding even affected science fiction works after 2000, causing many science fiction works to coincidentally set the defect of short lifespan for clones when setting up clones.
Fortunately, at the end of 2019, this misunderstanding was finally uncovered —
In November 2019, Professor Li and his team of the Key Laboratory of Animal Reproductive Regulation and Reproduction in Mainland China made a decisive conclusion in the study of the telomeres of cloned animals:
After years of research, Professor Li and his team discovered that the phenomenon of telomere reprogramming would occur in cloned embryos during the period of zygotic genome activation. No matter the length of the telomeres of the donor cells, the reprogramming process could restore them to their original length, which was the length of the donor itself!
Not only that, but Professor Li also found that the length of the telomeres was actually related to the development of the cloned embryos. During the cloning process, the telomeres of the cloned embryos that developed normally could be significantly restored, while the telomeres of the cloned embryos with abnormal development not only did not recover, but they would shorten even more.
In addition, Professor Li also discovered that during the cultivation process of cloned embryos, adding some small molecules such as tricomycin A, sodium butyrate, melatonin, and so on could effectively improve the efficiency of telomere reprogramming in a low-oxygen environment!
This research result was published in the journal of the North American Federation of Societies for Experimental Biology.
The paper was titled "Inhibiting
reprogramming”。
At this point, the misunderstanding that the lifespan of cloned animals was limited by the donor was completely dispelled.
As for why the cloned sheep Dolly had premature aging and why the length of the telomeres was not enough? That would depend on the benevolent and the wise.
While the laboratory was cultivating the cloned embryos of this group of elderly people, Dlamini finally sent over the people on Chen Chen's list.
This time, Dlamini sent a total of thirty people, all of whom were the cream of the crop. Even a trump card like Cheng Cao would not stand out among them.
As long as Chen Chen could subdue this group of jackal-like mercenaries, he would have the foundation to build a rapid response force in the future.
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