Scientists in Australia are making the extraordinary first steps in bringing an extinct frog species back to life, according to Salon magazine, while others are working on genome sequencing for long-dead species such as the woolly mammoth. Could the rebirth of dead animals mean the end of extinction?
Using the cloning technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer over the course of the past five years, a University of New South Wales research team has been replacing the nuclei of fresh amphibian eggs of the closely related Great Barred Frog with frozen ones from the extinct southern gastric-brooding frogs, the extinct eggs collected in the 1970s and kept in a freezer for 40 years. (The Rheobatrachus silus frog, which swallowed its own eggs before giving birth to babies via its mouth, went extinct in 1983).
In March, "some of these eggs began to spontaneously divide over the course of several days, reaching the early embryonic stage," according to Salon.
"We are watching Lazarus arise from the dead, step by exciting step. We've reactivated dead cells into living ones and revived the extinct frog's genome in the process," Mike Archer, a professor of paleobiology at the University of New South Wales, said in a statement from the university. "Now we have fresh cryo-preserved cells of the extinct frog to use in future cloning experiments. We're increasingly confident that the hurdles ahead are technological and not biological and that we will succeed. Importantly, we've demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world's amphibian species are in catastrophic decline."
Similar de-extinction initiatives have been taking place all around the world. Four years ago in Spain, scientists were at work trying to bring back the Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, by cloning its DNA taken from frozen skin tissue samples. Though a baby ibex was successfully cloned in 2009, it died shortly after birth due to physical defects.
In South Korea, the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation has been working with Russian scientists and the Beijing Genomics Institute in an attempt to do the unthinkable: clone the great woolly mammoth, perhaps the most ambitious de-extinction project yet.
"I've always been very skeptical about the whole idea, but it dawned on me that if you could clear the first hurdle of getting viable cells from mammoths, you might be able to do something useful and interesting," Ian Wilmut, the scientist responsible for the sheep Dolly, the world's first cloned animal, told the Guardian in July. "I think it should be done as long as we can provide great care for the animal. If there are reasonable prospects of them being healthy, we should do it. We can learn a lot about them."
And at the University of California, Santa Cruz, scientists are working sequencing the genome of the extinct passenger pigeon that died out in 1914, while others are "setting their sites on doing similar work on the extinct Californian monk seal, Carolina parakeet and Tasmanian tiger," according to the Daily Mail.
Despite conflicting views on the ethics of cloning within the scientific community, many would likely agree with what environmentalist Stuard Brand once said: "Humans have made a huge hole in nature, we have the ability, maybe the moral obligation, to repair that damage."
