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Cenozoic Park: Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger
Mirk writes "The
Australian Museum
reports a breakthrough in their plans to clone the Tasmanian Tiger. The ``tiger'', actually a carnivorous marsupial, became extinct in 1936, when the last known
specimen died in captivity. Er, did I say ``extinct''?
Now it looks like what everyone thought was an extinction may be
``a 70-year hiccup'', to quote the press release. The museum's Evolutionary Biology Unit have successfully replicated individual Tasmanian Tiger genes using a process known as
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)."
Scientists don't go around cloning every extinct animal. Not every animal died because of evil humans, some died because they weren't fit to survive in this world. Bringing them back now, when other species have evolved, could throw everything off balance and screw up the world even more.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
State funded cloning... kinda like a movie I just watched yesterday.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Bugs Bunny will just kill it again.
Best Windows Freeware
What will be the next cloned species? Dinosaurs? Bad idea...
Sweet holy shit... these museums must use really crap hardware...
While your at it, bring those dodo's back too!
Indeed this is a great solution if they can just get it to work properly and be able to breed the offspring. Of course as far as I know no-one has yet tried to breed animals that have been created through cloning procedures, and for a species to become viable this is an obvious must, however once this hurdle is cleared there are great possibilities as to what damage we can undo. Next up, the dodo bird.
...and don't want to rehash the whole 'Jurassic Park' cliche'. I have to believe that a species is extinct for a reason. Yes, maybe it's because Man destroyed their habitat or hunted them to extinction, but the fact remains, they're extinct, they could not adapt for survival. Surely there's a reason for that? This can't end well.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
and we will get a choice at the thanksgiving !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
This feels like the sort of thing Philip K. Dick would write about. Worried about that extinct species? Just save a specimen in a jar; we can bring it back later.
What are the limits? Could someone theoretically clone Abraham Lincoln from his remains?
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
...but they won't be.
Environmental activism is supposed to be all about preserving "Earth's delicate balance," of which extinction is a natural, and vital process.
But, of course, they'll overlook that if it means injecting a cutesy-woosty puddy-tat back into a wild that no longer finds the critter-witter necessary, because we got one over on the evil-weevil human beings.
*shrug*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Next stop... Serpentor
"The corner stone that the builders left out is the corner stone on which I build my church." said the Man.
Why bring it back?
I'm not trolling either either, I'm totally
serious.
Couple of comments on the ever-so-brief-and-simple press release:
(1) No mention of the increasing research into why cloning large mammals if more difficult than thought. See recent New Scientist magazines for pop coverage.
(2) No mention of host animals. The Tiger can't be brought back whole and entire, something needs to act as a host - 90% close relative, 10% recovered DNA. Then work up.
(3) No mention of gene pools and viable population sizes. Pick one human - clone a breeding population from them. Fancy working with them? Didn't think so.
Still, interesting project!
Quickly collect as much sperm and eggs from endangered species as you can. If needed, try to collect these from live animals.
If this is not possible, use cloning techniques... and try to work out the bugs of the cloning process (rapid aging, damaged genes, etc...).
Wait until the ecological situation in the region of the endangered animal is back to normal (or as near normal as possible), "reproduce" the animal in a compatible donor, or a genetically-engineered one if no compatible donors are available. Re-introduce several cloned members of the specie. After a while, you should have restored "lost" species and ecological diversity.
And the best thing is, you can do this even more easily with plants.
I think this is much more interesting than freezing your own brain for posterity. Probably a much better use of genetics than GMOs...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the test tubes of the night,
What immortal laborat'ry
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Sorry.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
... is cloning slashdot articles!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
1. The early days of the 'net
2. The Star Wars mythos
3. The post-September 11th cultural landscape
Of course, I could be wrong...... ; - )
Yeah.. they made a movie about this. Anyone happen to see Juraissic Park??? Before we know it, they'll be cloning dinosaurs and raptors will take over the earth...
I saw astory about the possibility that the Tasmania Tiger never really became extinct. They just "disappeared".
The show displayed some evidence of the possibility of one of those creatures having been shot dead in the 60's, plus some interesting film from the 70's(?) that showed a creature running, that based upon the make-up of the Tasmanian Tiger, could almost be nothing else.
It would be interesting to see if Scientists could recreate cush a creature, although there is a place where we really should draw the line, otherwise we may end up with some bizarre Jurasic Park in real life.
While it could be exciting, I don't think that it would be quite as fun as the movie. You know, sice real people could be eaten by real dinosaurs.
Dangerous animals should never be cloned. Only a few "non-dangerous" animals should be. Not for anything other than scientific curiosity.
There is little to no need to have thousands of Whooly Mammoths running about. Unless of course, we are going to use them as a food source. But who wants to run around in a loin clothe or naked after some giant hairy elephant? Besides, it would probably cost to much to feed a herd of those creatures...
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I guess until a major mishap happens (mis engineered clones? a more deadlier tiger?) , ppl will not learn....
----------------------------------- http://www.superesc.com
Tasmanian tiger, not Tasmanian devil. In the future, please pay more attention to the details; they're important.
You can find out more about "Tasmanian Tigers" at The Thylacine Museum. In reality it's a marsupial, not a mammal, and so it's closer to an opossum than a feline like a tiger. The only reason it's called a "tiger" is because of its stripes, as seen in the photo at the top of this webpage about mysterious animals. And it may not even be extinct...
For the theoligically inclined:
Could this be classified as the dead rising from the grave...?
For the atheologically inclined:
The theologically inclined will be thinking this...
http://www.tased.edu.au/tot/fauna/tiger.html
"The Tasmanian Tiger , also called the Tasmanian Wolf, is a large marsupial native to Tasmania. Most scientists believe it to be extinct, however each year there are about a dozen unconfirmed sightings in remote areas of the state, and several reported sets of Tiger tracks."
How to Download YouTube Videos
looks like what everyone thought was an extinction may be ``a 70-year hiccup''
Hiccup is an understatement. The animal's gene pool is destroyed - how can a few clones make up for this? Can a species be totally revived by this method? I doubt it.
Extinct Tasmanian Tiger One Step Closer to Cloning
Since that poor Australian server just got completely and utterly flamed... :(
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
In the future please remove the stick from your ass and have a sense of humour; its important.
PCR doesnt get you a clone
you need a host egg and the actual DNA I would like to see them synthsize it but somehow I dont think so
regards
john jones
It is an obvious must that any animal that would be restored using this procedure should be considered carefully, and the main critera should be based upon several points:
1. Is the animal extinct today due to human interference?
2. Can the animal re-establish itself in todays ecology?
3. Is it practical to re-introduce the animal back into the wild?
If the answer to all of these major questions (and many more minor questions) is yes, then I can see no good reason not to undo the damage humans have caused to these species.
Wow, connection refused this time. Here is a working link to the Reuters story.
Is that the behavior of most of these now extinct animals is learned.. just as humans, passed on from generation to generation. So if we now bring these animals back how do we teach them to act? starting with a brainwashed species would not be the same as still having it around.. you could technically bring back a fierce hunting/meat eating dinosaur and have it as a house pet.. could be interesting
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
It's great that they could amplify a piece of the animal's old dna using PCR - but they are no where near having a "cloned" animal. So much so that it's not even worth talking about it in the article. They amplified a fragment of DNA but this is not what you need to do cloning. Until they come up with a surefire method to amplify a whole genome then what they have done is useless (with regards to cloning). Possibly if they had an old frozen carcass lying in storage they could salvage an intact cell, suck the nuclear DNA out of it, and inject it into an egg and get a viable clone.
If they are really serious about cloning the whole animal they should wait until the technology is actually available and not waste the DNA that they have some largely pointless "experiments".
The breakthrough here is that PCR confirmed that there was very little damage to the ethanol preserved specimen. The next step is that they are planning on using PCR amplified DNA to "rebuild" the genome of the Tasmanian Tiger. To my knowledge, all other cloning involves injecting cell nuclei into oocytes (eggs). This has the advantage of preserving genes in the proper context. This is probably not possible with the preserved specimens.
Trying to re-build the entire Tasmanian Tiger genome, essentially from scratch, to produce artificial chromosomes is a huge undertaking - by the researcher's estimates, this could take 10-15 years.
All you really need to do is look at the track record of the introduction of foreign species into environments that had not evolved with them.
;) -- the introduction of the mongoose to fight the rat population in the sugar cane fields has had a negative impact on the native bird populations.
Take Hawaii (okay, share it with the rest of us
Or to quote my favorite Jeff Goldblum line:
"You were so busy trying to see if you could do it that you didn't stop to think about whether you should."
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
4. Does it taste good ?
Gives a whole new meaning of "going the way of the DoDo" doesent it? ;)
I will bend your mind with my spoon
How fucking unoriginal...
Trolls copying other trolls by "invalidating claims of FP". Your lack of originality leads me to believe that you are an open source troll.
Remember, you can't spell "open source trolls are faggots" without the word 'open source trolls are faggots'. Yeea... think about it >:-|
I reclaim FP in the name of "hypocritical closed-source trolls".
A lot of people are saying that this species, among others died off for a reason. If that's the case, however, wouldn't they be destined to die off again once we bring them back? There are quite a few species out there that were driven to extinction by humans during a time when we didn't really think much about natural conservation.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you're selling it .
Posited that Australian werewolves were descended from Tasmanian Tigers (even had the stripes).
I own all three movies on DVD so I feel i'm pretty much an expert in this field so...
Somethings scientists should know before creating Jurassic Park:
1) Doesn't matter if you create them all female, somehow they will reproduce...
2) While it may seem wise to create them on a remote island, it really isn't, trust me, I know.
3) No matter how good the security is and how strong the cages are, they will escape, so might be a good idea to only create the small cute ones.
4) And this is the important one, Don't EVER forget, that they have outsmarted scientists on at least 3 different blockbuster entertaining occasions, and they will do it again.
I believe that instincts would win out over any training that we could give such an animal. It took thousands of years to domesticate the dog and sorta domesticate the cat.
I highly doubt that a giant carnivore like a T. Rex would simply roll over and let one scratch its belly.
Imagine if a few of them got loose in the countryside. If they were able to hide and reproduce, like the many wild jungle cats running around in England these days, we would have a serious problem on our hands.
In time, these "domesticated" carnivores would become the wild carnivoruous creatures that they evolved into millions of years ago.
Anyone that thinks otherwise should start talking to Lion and Tiger trainers to find out how "trusting" they are of all their cats.
Heck, recently a zoologist had her arm torn off by a "domestic" lion or tiger while giving a tour to her family. This lion or tiger, probably saw this zoologist every single day. She probably fed and cared for this big cat all of the time. Still the damnable thing TORE off her arm. It didn't even give a second thought.
You think that a "domestic" T. Rex will never do such a thing?
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I'm capped, and yet I still whore.
DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is:
5' ATTTC 3'
then the other strand is:
3' TAAAG 5'
The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.
When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands:
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)
and each strand has it's complement added.
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'
The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)
UAA
floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.
So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:
5' ATTTG (long space........) TCGTC 3'
3' TAAAC (long space........) AGGAG 5'
and you add:
TAAAC and TCGTC
You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.
More history here.
A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Polymerase Chain Reaction isn't really new its at least 5 or six years old. I remember reading about it in Popular Science way back when. As I recall the process is pretty ingenious. First you take a sample DNA molecule, and split the helix down the middle and drop the two halves into a solution of (god I whish I paid more attention in Biology) ,forgive spelling, Addnine, Guanine, and all those other bits of DNA. Then each half rebuilds itself, splits and repeats. The reaction continues until the catalist runs out. Very quickly you can produce several hundred thousand copies of a DNA strand.
For those too lazy to do a google search, there is a breif overview of the process Here
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Proof.
The Sydney Morning Herald have just done an article on this. While it doesn't cover much more than the one linked in the article, it has links to some other SMH articles. One Of them is an interview with one of the main scientists behind it, and is quite insightful. The other is a gallery of relevent photos.
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
You're wrong...
See for yourself
it's a marsupial, not a mammal
I think you've got your facts wrong. All marsupials are mammals.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
The word extinct may be a its own... whatever.
I'll shutup now.
The inventor PCR, Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate, LSD user, all round cool dude, thinks AIDS/HIV is twaddle. And so do I and 500 other PHDs. Check out rethinking-aids.org
(BTW PCR is used in the "aids test")
I think that even if it takes 10-20 years of hard effort, that this is something that must be done. It is an incredible test case for techniques that could be applied to many extinct species.
Lastly, I think the PCR breakthrough is important because it shows that the DNA strands are undamaged in these specimens. That means that they can be replicated and potentially sequenced in the manner of the human genome project. This way we can record the Thylacine genome permanently on a CD instead of in a jar, something we can only dream of for the dinosours in Jurassic Park. If this can be done for enough specimens, then it doesn't matter how long it takes us to develop the techniques - we should eventually be able to resurrect the tiger. The digital information isn't going anywhere.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
From the article, "In 1999 DNA was successfully extracted from an ethanol preserved Tasmanian Tiger pup sample."
So... that would be beer-battered Tasmanian Tiger pup? Mmmm good!
I recall reading some time ago about a japanese scientist hunting for intact deep frozen mammoths in siberia. Not sure I think plan was to use elephant eggs, inject mammoth DNA...and wait. mammoths were lving until roughly 8000 years ago. cve paintings show mammoth hunts. anyone know whats the progress?
Why do people think that they are not part of nature. If this animal was made extinct because human killed it off for what ever reason how is it different from another predatator killing off another species. I don't want to sound heartless but this animal became extinct because it wasn't able to adapt to the environment that it found itself. We are part of nature the extinction of this animal wasn't a mistake it was part of nature.
I know we have guns etc but that is just our natural advantage, our ability to create machines that enhance our natural abilities. We wouldn't bring back an species that was beaten to death by apes with sticks (okay we'd probably spend years studying the apes) so why do it now?
Not necessarily, no. Sometimes there's not a reason for it. Evolution is a messy process, not some all-knowing entity that always picks correctly which species "should" live and which "should" die.
We're already a major influence within the process because of our clumsiness. With some careful forethought -- for a change -- maybe we can be a positive influence. Bringing a specific specie back isn't necessarily a good idea, but it would definitely be a good thing to develop the option.
The University of Iowa has one of those really old natural history museums, one that was filled in the 1800's by world-travelling 'naturalists' who saw it as their sworn duty to kill, stuff, and bring back one of everything for their home museum. They've got bison and a narwhal, and even a stuffed whooping crane! But their dodo is a fake. Dodos went extinct long before the natural history craze of the 19th century, but as I understand it, there was quite a trade in fake dodos. Seems every museum wanted one and there weren't more than a handful in existence, so somebody made some bucks creating fake ones. The one the U of I museum has is kind of motheaten, but not much worse than the whooping crane, and looks darned convincing. Bottom line - it might be kind of difficult coming up with some real dodo DNA. If you just grab a random 'dodo' from a natural history collecion, you're likely to end up with DNA from a half-dozen totally unrelated birds!
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
unless it's adaptation was "appeal to genetic scientists as a good candidate for a Polymerase Chain Reaction"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There are still occasional sightings of dog-like critters where the Thylacine roamed, but they are probably foxes.
The recently deceased David Fleay was particularly proud of, among other things, breeding platypus and having a big scar on his bum from when he was bitten by a Thylacine.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Not only could some balance be thrown off, but what are the chances they get it [it being the genetic makeup of the tiger] right the first time. They won't and there will be some different creature "created".
Not for us to decide.
Everyone knows it's gonna happen. Someday, these scientists are gonna create a breed of killer tomatoes!!! It will be the end of the world as we know it...
Although extinction is a vital component of natural selection (there must be more indiviudals born than can survive), it can also be a rather random process. A species could be hanging out down in Yucutan, and suddenly a large fiery rock falls from the sky and vaporizes water, rock, and your entire gene pool. Bad genes or bad luck, as Dave Raup so succintly put it. Evolution is not all "invetiable progress", luck has a lot more to do with it than any of us would like to admit. Just like people who makes a fortune on the stock market, but has very little skill. SOMBODY has to win all those coin tosses. It isn't that much different at macroevolutionary timescales.
"Hope is a duty from which paleontologists are exempt." David Quammen
What's to stop them from cloning Elvis? It has to stop somewhere. Although the idea of cloning Jesus Christ does sound pretty cool. But I think God would be pissed and just end the world right there and then.
see 1998 report at http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news50.htm
Does one of those links explain how the hell we got from "Say, this long strand of weakly held together goo looks interesting" to A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase?
Ooops. You're right. Back to studying Venn Diagrams for me!
I'd sure like it if a couple of species would return to existence that were obliterated earlier.
Two examples from the last several hundred years include the great auk and the passenger pigeon.
Two examples of species that humankind hunted to extinction (since they were such wonderful food sources) include the woolly mammoth and the giant sloth.
I recall an historical account of the last great auk being killed so that it could be stuffed and placed in the British museum. The collectors also took pains to destroy the last eggs in the nest at the same time. Gives you some idea of how much our views of what is fitting and proper for us to do in the world can change over a few hundred years.
Now that there are so many of us humans in a finite sized world, and our technological means of changing the world are more influential, it behoves us to give more and more thought to the consequences of our actions.
It's really only our capability for reasoning and thought that gives us a chance of beating the other animals for long term survival of our species.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~danny/mirror.jpg
Of course, we will never know for sure.
However, if some scientists are right and the Dinosaurs were warm-blooded, we could have a spot of trouble. They would also be more aclimated to our time since they would have been created in our time already exposed to the micrsoscopic bugs that we have all around us.
You see, when they were being developed in the "womb" they are given exposure to the diseases that the mother creature was exposed to. This would help them create immunity to the diseases that are prevelant.
Of course, they may require more oxygen to breath than us. Which, might mean they take deeper breaths. This could lead to higher percentages of asthma afflicted Dinosaurs...
Then there would be the scientists mucking about with their genetic make-up so that they would better survive our modern climate. All for the good of science and mankind mind you. They would be foolishly creating a super species of Dinosaur without even thinking of the consequences of their actions.
I have noted that people rarely consider the consequences of their actions. I must say that I am indeed one of those people. Although, I have yet to really do something truly terrible and idiotic...
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
PCR is a technique that is successful in replicating even very small pieces of DNA. It 'amplifies' extremely small samples of material into amounts that are detectable. Essentially, this group in Australia has determined that they have some DNA from the Tasmanian Tiger, but they have no idea how much of the genome. It is highly likely that there just isn't enough enact DNA to be useful for the creation of an animal.
Assume for a moment that they are exceptionally lucky and have an intact genome from two individuals, one male and one female. The scientists then pass the substantial hurdle of cloning these individuals (no marsupials have been cloned yet). What do they have: two individuals. This would amount to a 'population bottleneck' of the worst magnitude. Who will these animals' offspring mate with?
I've been reading the late Stephen Jay Gould's book Dinosaur in a Haystack, in which he notes that Jurassic Park-style cloning wouldn't work for a number of basic technical reasons.
Did he ever mention this project in any of his other books? DiaH is the only book I've read so far...
Species die out, new species evolve.
Attempting to stop time and preserve all existing species at a specific point in time is a truly futile act.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Actually, it doesn't matter much at all. If everything dies, or if dinosaurs come back, oh well. Last I checked I can personally adapt to different situations very well. Unless you believe in god and things like fate, bringing back extinct animals isn't a "bad thing", it's just a different thing.
Hope you have a fire extinguisher.
The Tassie devil has been suggested as a host. The big advantage for the thylacine, and the reason why it will probably be the first successful recovery, is that it is a marsupial, which means it is born when it is basically still a foetus. This means that the host animal can be kept on immunosuppressants for the short duration of pregnancy without rejecting the embyo or getting too screwed up itself. Something like a mammoth, on the other hand, would need to be carried for 18 months inside what would end up being a very sick elephant.
So this means we can hunt endangered species now right?
Tiger 1: "Hey, don't look now but over your right shoulder....there's a neanthradal man sneaking up behind you. And he's going to hit one of us. You know they got Charlie last week?"
Tiger 2: "Charlie?"
Tiger 1: "Yeah Charlie, you know the saber-tooth tiger that lives on the end of the jungle that only has one saber....And he growls with a lisp.. He goes, "GRRRAAAAACKK."
Tiger 2: "So what should we do?"
Tiger 1: "Lets start growling and making a whole bunch of noise and see what he does."
Tiger 2: "Okay."
Tiger 1 and 2: "GRROWWWWWLLL GRRRRAAOOWWWLLL!! ROAAAAAARRRRRR!"
Tiger 2: "What's he doing now?"
Tiger 1: "He's eatin Bushes."
(ripped very carelessly from memory from, "When I was a Child" by Bill Cosby)
I think it goes something like:
"The scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to think whether they should."
The relevance to that seems to be cropping up quite a lot these days..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
You're right, I'm wrong. See above. Marsupials only have breasts (presumably we all know what breasts are, provide you own link for those) and they don't have placentas which connect unborn offspring to their mother for nourishment. And speaking of placental nourishment, here are some yummy recipes. Score some brownie points with your wife/girlfriend/significant other about the fate of the placenta when you two have kids, she will find you SO sensitive and romantic...
Where did you get this RNA primer stuff from?
...
I believe that's how it was done, back when PCR was invented (back in 1985 or so) but nowadays, no one uses RNA as primers without a very good reason to do so. Why? RNA is unstable, and you have RNAses (enzymes that break up RNA) on your hands, in your spit, everywhere
What's used today is short oligonucleotides as primers. These are short, single-stranded DNA stretches that are synthesized by a chemical process and subsequently purified. They are available from commercial suppliers at something like 50 cent a base.
Whatever happened to that wooly mammoth that was excavated from a frozen lake in the arctic a couple years ago. It was a big deal on the Discovery channel.
Anyways, I remember them saying they were going to try to extract some DNA from the beast and then close it. Anybody have any information on that project?
mod this up it's hella funny!
I have to believe that a species is extinct for a reason. Yes, maybe it's because Man destroyed their habitat or hunted them to extinction, but the fact remains, they're extinct, they could not adapt for survival.
If I shoot you in the head, could I argue that you could not adapt for survival?
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
I am a biologist, and I've never understood why people, even people that don't believe in a "higher power" of some sort, still believe that extinction happens for some mystical, Gaia-esque "reason" (beyond the obvious direct causal mechanism). It doesn't. Extinction just happens. Evolution doesn't CARE about fitness - less "fit" animals just happen to be less sucessfull over time and in a changing environment - there is no moral judgement going on by nature!
Please tell me how an animal that was hunted to (supposed) extinction is poorly adapted? It's a predator, not a fast-reproducing herbivorous animal with a low gestation time and large number of offspring - EXACTLY the kind of species that is most vulnerable to extinction via humans.
Now, there are valid concerns here in this case, most of them being technical, IMHO. Chromosomal damage from the ethanol, the task of repairing said chromosomes, host-animal interactions, and the genetic defects and abnormal growth patterns seen in other mammalian cloning efforts are all hurdles. In addition, there is the question of the genetic diversity of a founder population being enough to maintain a viable population in the future. As to the "ecological balance" option - this is not a true foreign species, and poses little threat to indigenous fauna. Predatory animals like this are MUCH less dangerous to "bring back" (as would be mammoths and yes, dinosaurs) - as their impact is much more easily calculable, and their population more easily controllable. The vast majority of ecological damage by people has been due to introduction of truly foreign organisms that have high-reproductive capacities and large tolerances to attempts made to control their growth - organisms such as rodents, rabbits, cane toads, insects, kudzu and other weeds, as well as domestic pets.
I feel that restoring extinct animals whose ecological effects are minimal or easily controlled (as would be in the Tasmanian Tiger) and whose extinction was caused by humans is a laudable goal. In addition, the zoological and evolutionary benefits of cloning extinct animals is a worthy goal in and of itself, even if the only specimens are kept in zoos/labs for study. Finally, I would once again like to point out that JURASSIC PARK IS NOT REAL SCIENCE, and that Hollywood moralizing in ANY movie should always be taken with a grain of salt.
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
Neuroscience Program
Universtiy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
crispiewm@hotmail.com
You're right ... the polymerase chain reaction is anything but new ... It was invented over 15 years ago.
The absolutely ingenious step in the development of this technique was the idea to use thermostable enzymes to do it. Similar things were done before, but after each round of amplifying the DNA, you had to cook your samples (well, 94C anyways) to separate the double-stranded DNA into single strands. That usually killed off the enzyme, so fresh enzyme had to be added after each cycle. But using a polymerase taken from a thermophilic bacterium (Thermus aquaticus), you could heat your samples as required without finishing off the enzyme, since it tolerates high temperatures. Thus, you could repeat cycle after cycle, and with each cycle, you get twice as much product as you had before.
Ok, sometimes I just can't help feeding the trolls, so here goes...
Ever heard of something called the Precautionary Principle? It's a risk/hazard assessment method becoming common (it's already law for certain things in the EU) for environmental (and other) use around the world, and it looks at ways of minimizing risks, hazards, and above all, harm, which is really what environmentalism is about, not a bleeding-heart slavish devotion to "cute."
As for myself, speaking as at least some kind of an environmentalist, I'm not sure injecting extinct animals back into the ecosystem (which is a very heavy system, go read your systems theory again) is a good idea. At best, it should only happen after a thorough risk/hazard assessment, including long-term second and onward order results modelling, and then only if there's no "reasonable doubt."
On the bright side, it doesn't look as though they're far enough along with this project to warrant serious paranoia...yet.
Oh, and...the thing wasn't a "puddy tat." It was a carnivorous marsupial; hardly the kind of thing I'd want in my bed, and probably not (judging by other marsupials) cute in the least, and it probably got the name "tiger" because of the non-cute tiger-like traits it had (hunting, killing, perhaps?). So, please, a little credit?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I don't see why anybody would want to clone philocenes and have them running around anyway...the reason that they were hunted down to extinction was nothing so tacky as people wanting trophies...they were really bad sheep-killers. They are horrendous for livestock...so what are we going to do? Repopulate Australia with these dangerous animals just because they lived there? Or are we just going to breed enough of them to keep in a zoo? Yes, we have a sample preserved in alcohol, really good for preserving DNA, so it is possible to do it, but can anybody come up with a good reason? Do we need a top predator in Australia? Things seem to have stabilized since their extinction, so I really am not convinced that we need to bring them back. Not to mention that there's a good chance that there still is a wild population of them that is just staying away from man...many people have seen wild philocenes and in a number of cases their tracks have been observed....there's a lot of bush in Australia so it would probably be a lot cheaper to check and see if they're still running wild than to go and rebuild them.
Now what we do need to work on cloning is Serpentor. ARISE SERPENTOR, ARISE!
It does a good thing to the nature we are and been a part of and breaks the boundary of our existential level.
Creating remote controlled animals and therefore taking away what them BE, should account for more concern.
We're part of the evolution, our actions are the result of the evolution, our actions towards the evolution are caused by the evolution. Thus, our actions towards the evolution are either bad or good.
If anything, it might be a stable or unstable process.
This was posted right here on slashdot like 2 or 3 years ago now. Why such an old repost?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
No, it hasn't got anything to do with speed ...
Polymerase is the enzyme that makes DNA strands from single nucleotides. And theoretically, you could use human polymerase or dog or whatever.
The thing is this, though. PCR works in three steps:
1) denaturation: At 94C, your template DNA separates into two single strands
2) annealing: ~50-60C: The short primer sequences basepair with the single strands, providing a starting point for the polymerase
3) Elongation ~68-72C: The polymerase elongates the primer by inserting free bases, according to the template DNA.
After this single round of PCR, you've made 2 copies from one, now, repeat for 30 cycles or so.
The problem is the denaturation step. If you do this, a normal polymerase is cooked. A thermostable polymerase survives this brief 94C shock, saving you the trouble of adding fresh polymerase every cycle and making PCR practical and efficient.
Hope that clarified it
the Tasmainian tiger is extict because man hunted it to extinction. farmers didn't like it killing their livestock.
. as p
you can read here
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/ninenews/story_32532
It's just that, I can't help but be impressed by the categorization skills of scientists.
these guys have never seen Jurassic Park! If we start bringing back extinct animals, what is to stop us from bringing back dinosaurs or other dangerous creatures? This is not science, this is playing God. It is still really cool though :)
Forecast for tomorrow: A few sprinklings of genius with a chance of DOOM!
Yeah that's what I'm talkin bout.
...outside of a very controlled environment like zoos and labs.
These particular animals were exterminated because they were pests. Even the 70yrs they've been out of commision is probably enough to keep them surviving again in the wild.
But then again, just the other day, here in the Boston area I saw my first coyote. Go figure...
I need to correct you on that, Marsupials are mammals. Our lovely Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger/Wolf) is a marsupial and therefore, a mammal.
It seems to me the only advantage of bringing back an already extinct species is the generation of a new job title, the "evolutional engineer."
I can see how someone might want to create a few animals simply for research, or possibly a traveling zoo exhibit, although I do have a hard time seeing the advantage of cloning an entire genome, whether it is creating a dozen or even a thousand different animals, being all that beneficial to the Earthly ecology in any way.
Almost certainly we have accelerated a lot of species extinctions, yet so have many natural events, including but not limited to; super volcanoes, asteroid collisions, widespread illness, and climate change. The world ecology does benefit from this by opening niches that other species can evolve to fill. It has been thought that when there are large, widespread extinctions, that the worldly ecology can (and so far unfailingly) diversify and relatively quickly fill the gaps left by those species that died off.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
correct me if i'm wrong (i frequently am) RT/PCR is not really cloning per se, but more amplification of DNA. It is the same procedure used in forensics (and other fields) to replicate a small amount of DNA into measurable quantities. It's not like they are gonna be able to make a tiger out of it, as that would require cell replication.
today is spelling optional day.
Eh, nobody will read this because I'm not going to bother to register. But since I've been to Tasmania and talked to people about this...
1. The habitat is still intact, and set aside as a preserve.
2. The prey is still intact.
3. There are a lot of specimins in jars - in theory there's enough for a viable population.
4. They were hunted out by ranchers (like wolves).
5. Some people believe that they aren't actually extinct.
The Tazmanian Tiger could easily be fit for its environment again. First, they only died out because we went around shooting them with guns. Just leaving them alone would probably be enough to get them back on their feet. Then there's the chance that it might be possible to sell gaming rights at some astronomical figure which makes it worthwhile for the locals to keep the tigers around.
::ducks and runs::
Yes, I'm saying that we should bring these poor creatures back from extinction so we can start shooting them again.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Now what we do need to work on cloning is Serpentor. ARISE SERPENTOR, ARISE!
:)
I have the movie on DVD
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Unlike the fictional Jurassic Park, in real life we'd shoot the dinosaurs. Bye bye dinosaurs (of course, would have made a dull movie).
There are plenty of big dangerous animals around, and there have been for centuries - we managed to come top of the food chain using spears and arrows, and good luck to any animal that thinks it can topple us.
Just what are you scared of?
the many wild jungle cats running around in England
Oh yeah see them *every day*. Get a fucking grip on reality! This myths have been going around for *centuries* (litteraly) and are still not true.
There are precious few wildcats in Scotland (and they are no bigger than domestic moggies), there are not large litters of 'wild animals'. England is so small and the is one of the most heavily populated areas *in the World*, you'd bump into them every five minutes!
Do you also believe crop circles are made by aliens?
Imagine if a few of them got loose in the countryside....we would have a serious problem on our hands
Bullshit. What, you think maybe they would take over the world? Are you confusing them with Pinky and Brain?
They *might* manage to kill a handful of people, but as of course they'd have eletronic tags, so spotting them really quickly by tracking them remotely and then shooting them would be a non-issue.
Kook.
Nonsense. They are extinct due to the Fall. Not some secret will of the Earth goddess. Bringing them back, if it can be done, is a proper thing for human beings to do.
Of course they might not actually be extinct. There is a small, but fairly continuous stream of sitings in New Guinea.
and Frank Zappa and Stevie Ray Vaughn and Linda Lovelace!!!!
Whoever modded this parent up is an idiot!
Wait a minute here....you're idea about preserving "Earth's delicate balance" is incorrect......
Species don't die off by themselves - there are reasons for extinction. The biggest of this time period being HUMANS. We have literally obliterated thousands of different species of animal out of existance - all through over population, over developement, and over hunting.
The recent developements of genetic cloning and DNA research will hopefully provide the means to re-introduce some of these long forgotten species of animals back to our planet and fill their void in the "life cycle."
PCR is just replicating DNA... They are using it to generate a "library;" which is putting fragments of Thalycine DNA into bacterial circular DNA. We have library of many living species, but we still haven't clone any living organism out of those libraries.
What have these ppl accomplished that others haven't done already? Others have extracted and made library of dinosaur DNA out of (petrified) fossils!
Since this 'sky is falling' scenario is expected by responsible people, then what is implemented to at least mitigate if not attempt to detect early flaws (much like many cancer screenings) is periodic and random testing combined with BACKUPS. Considering the complexity of DNA (and its effects/interactions with living systems) I hope that these scientists first backup everything they have, including research notes and implementation rational. It might be nice to do some ego scrubbing as well. I think many here have heard many times something along the lines of 'we know everything (TM) there is to know about [subject]' from self labled scientists. (hmmm, this is like the "what defines a professional' debate, which if you only define it as someone getting paid to do [task] then you are a pro').
I would hate to see everyone put all their eggs (pun intended) in one basket only to find out years or decades later that the mistakes made are irreversable and will cause, in the best case scenario, a 'back to the drawing board approach'. The worst case scenario would be to lose all data and genetic material causing many decades of work to be lost and require a reinvention of the wheel.
I guess this all stems from my mistrust of the scientific community as a whole. There are some very ethical and wise scientists out there... then there are the rest of them.
"I find your lack of faith... disturbing" hahaha, ok well anyway. Your post tells me that you are someone who does indeed believe in God but that you are unsure of it, and are in the process of trying to convince yourself that He doesn't exist simply out of repitition. There is the old adage of 'if you have nothing to prove, then why are you out to prove something'. I feel pity for you. Internal conflict and denial are sad things indeed. If you trully believe there is no God, then believe it and move on.
It's nuclear transfer not cloning..
Nuclear transfer is technology by which animals are created by cloning a single diploid somatic cell. It involves taking a single diploid cell from a culture of cells, and inserting it into an enucleated ovum, i.e., an ovum from which the haploid nucleus has been removed. The resultant diploid ovum develops into an embryo that is placed in a recipient female, which gives birth to the cloned animal in the normal manner. Note that the term is somewhat of a misnomer, since it is a whole cell that is transferred, not just the nucleus.
Next thing you know you'll be throwing around other words incorrectly like "karma" Ooops.... too late..
The were also hunted into extinction.
Sure you can amplify bits of DNA from the thylacine (aka Tasmanian tiger).
You might be able to reconstruct the entire genome, or at least reconstruct the coding part of it exactly and the non-coding parts of it (like junk DNA) closely enough to work.
But you still have two hurdles:
- You need to make the genome into functioning chromosomes. This means wrapping huge DNA molecules with a structural scaffolding of protein and stuff. There are also chemical modifications to some bases (such as methylation) which occur in poorly understood patterns and affect gene expression. Artificial chromosomes have been made, but I don't think we know how to assemble a stable, full-size, fully functioning chromosome yet.
- More importantly, say you have total genome sequence assembled into chromosomes - what do you do with it? To produce an animal, you also need to reconstruct a thylacine ovum (egg). A mammal's ovum is full of special genetic instructions (mRNA) and regulatory proteins produced by the mother. How will we make one? Even if we found a preserved one, nobody knows how to assemble a functioning animal cell, let alone one of an unknown type. I seriously doubt the Jurassic Park solution of "use an egg cell from a related species" would work.
To really clone an extinct animal, you'd need to have to reconstruct how the ovum worked by some kind of fantastically complex computer simulation based on the genome sequence. Then you'd have to make the ovum, put it in an artificial womb or modern day host (which would be fairly easy compared with the previous bits), and bring it to term.I think any information we can get about the thylacine is worth getting, but don't hold your breath for results ...
Let's say that the museum is successful in cloning the Thylacine. What happens next? Would they plan to try to reintroduce a population into the wild?
It seems to me that after 70 years, the ecosystem will have adjusted to the extinction of the thylacine, i.e., it will have reached a thylacine-free equilibrium. Won't the reintroduction of the thylacine, with the accompanying aid that a repopulation effort would undoubtedly have, displace existing species? Wouldn't they be introducing what is now an alien species to a stable ecosystem?
On the other hand, if this is just a one-shot, what's the point? I can kind of see it if it's supposed to be a technological proof of concept type of thing, I suppose.
The bottom line here is that the whole repopulation of extinct species involves a degree of complexity with which man is not currently equipped(nor likely to be equipped in the near future). Not that EVER stops humans from imposing their ideas on things...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
sounds like a new disney movie... well anyway, I remember seeing some mention on one of the discover channels last month that for whatever reason, cities are housing more and more wild animals that we traditionally thought never could or would live there. Even places in which there are no large parks are becoming dwelling spots. Does this mean they are adapting... or perhaps that they watched Twelve Monkeys? :)
please elaborate
while many will argue with you they will not grasp the underlying problem of how many self labled Environmentalists are nothing but hateful nazis out to punish other people. it is their attitude and inconsistency that turns so many people away. Thankfully there are those that are rational and logical, while understanding that the 'save a tree, kill a logger' mentality is foolish, immoral, unethical and ultimately counterproductive.
First off, if you live in the city then you wouldn't see the wild cats. Secondly, perhaps you are forgetting that in the 60's it was rather posh to have big cats for pets. Then there were a series of attacks by leased big cats and some laws were put into place to license the owners of those exotic animals.
Everytime a law like that is enacted, people simply go to the woods and release their "domesticated" animals. There have been more than enough sighting and video footage, not to mention dung samples, that prove that there are some wild big cats running about England.
Besides, you must be daft to think that England is nothing but populated spaces. The last time I looked at anything about England cities only covered a small portion of the countryside.
As for them taking over the planet? No, I don't see that happening. I see them hiding, like big cats and attacking humans with a cunning that we may not quite understand. Perhaps, they are just big dumb lizards. However, they could be more or at least some of them could be more.
I am personally not scared of much, other than our own human stupidity. We are not the most powerful of creatures to exist. We do have our minds, but a mind doesn't mean anything if we are trapped in an alleyway without something to use as a weapon.
You see, in order for a human to be dangerous, we need to use a tool. If we haven't a tool, then we really aren't all that dangerous. Kung-Fu won't do jack against a 20 foot tall raging carnivore, hell it wouldn't do jack against a smaller rabid animal.
The only fear that I have is our own stupidity will be our undoing.
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
but I can't remember the name now.
if anyone can guess where that is from (specifically who said it and what the situation was too) they win some lentels
Nor was it survival. Tasmanian livestock farming could have done fine had the tiger not been intentionally hunted to extinction. However, the farms were slightly more profitable with the tiger gone. This economic motivation led to the tiger's extinction.
1. It is unlikely to work. A huge amount of money will be spent, and they are likely to end up with either a) nothing b) wacky spontaneously aborted fetuses c) almost-but-not-quite-right sterile or frail Taz tigers d) not enough genetic diversity, plus a fear that they should not release these into the wild, because there _might_ still be bona fide Taz tigers whose genes shouldn't be mixed with these questionable ones.
2. Whether or not it does work, the general public will think it did. Then they will cease to care when they hear that other species are going extinct. ("Oh, let's just put a few of them in jars of formaldehyde, just in case, for later.") If it does work, then preserving specimens, rather than habitats, will become the misguided policy. Great, a bunch of creatures, with nowhere for them to live!
3. Spending the money on habitat preservation and fighting introduction of foreign species is a more effective use of the money. Bringing just a Taz tiger back to life would be expensive. Imagine the expense if we try to do this at a rate of species/year that even begins to resemble the number of extinctions/year that are already occurring. For species residing on tropical islands, it would be cheaper to buy/seize these islands and mark them off-limits to everyone but biologists.
is only extinct because of massive over-hunting by humans.
But elephants cause tremendous damage to forests and other ecosystems in Africa. Imagine having them loose in Canada, uprooting trees, wandering near cities, smashing people...
The human involvement alone argument won't hold water, I think. It needs help ^_^
If a species became unfit and you reintroduced it, it's still going to be unfit, and will simply die out again.
If enough time has passed for a region to have significantly evolved after the passing of this species so that it no longer accurately reflects the environment it died out in, so much time has passed that I'd consider it unlikely there is even viable DNA lying around. That's on the order of thousands of years at the least, neh?
I wonder what will happen to the phrase "as dead as Dodo" when ultimately a Dodo is cloned !
All the Tigers are running wild! Someone let T-Rex out of his pen...
I guess I'll need to re write that line...
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
First off, if you live in the city then you wouldn't see the wild cats.
I spend 20 years living in the British countryside. The only fucking cats where domestic moggies.
YOUR A *NUTTER*.
We are not the most powerful of creatures to exist.
Yes we are. That's why we are the dominant species as the top of the food chain.
That's why there are so many exitinct species in the first place.
We are THE most dangerous species every to exist. To date, we are the only one capable of mass destruction.
Besides, you must be daft to think that England is nothing but populated spaces.
As I said *ENGLAND IS ONE OF THE MOST HEAVILY POPULATED AREAS IN THE WORLD*.
It's impossible to get any distance away from humans in England (though this is not true of Scotland which is lightly populated and has less people in it than live in London), England isn't very big. It's *tiny*. For example, the US has *states* twice the size of England.
Not a *SINGLE* SOLITARY reputable source (like the WWF, RSPCA, CPL, etc.) belives there are large wild cats in Britian.
The ONLY wildcats are in Scotland, and, as I said, are the size of a domestic moggie, terrfied of poeople and are an endangered species.
Only tiny minded little Englanders who haven't been to see the rest of the world can see *absurd* the idea is - wild cat encounters happen regularly the US and it's much bigger.
Yet no clear photograhs of such animals exist - only fuzzy pictures that could be domesic moggies or simple stuffed animals. Better photographic evidence exists of Bigfoot or Nessie!
You see, in order for a human to be dangerous, we need to use a tool. If we haven't a tool, then we really aren't all that dangerous.
Ah yes but we *do* have tools. LOTS of them and they make us *much* better at killing that all other animals.
And if we didn't? Well we will *make* them. THAT'S HOW WE GOT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN!
Your point? The only difference between man and nature is the speed and precision of evolution. We as any top predator have been slaughtering other animal populations as a neccesary function of our role. We introduce change surely as velicioraptors (sp?) once did and everything from the first multicellular animal that feasted on the unicellular ones we will continue in such fashion. Without culling of herbivores do you know what happens? They starve to death from overgrazing. Do you honestly think humanity is going to keep around 95% of the species of this planet when we have urbanized most of it? I cannot imagine the knowledge of ecosystem engineering will escape us for much longer.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
which makes you a voice crying in the wilderness here.
If only it were true that the same money available for things like cloning research could be made available to things like habitat preservation instead. But the interests that come up with the money are different enough that I don't think money could be transferred from one to the other.
"Not every animal died because of evil humans, some died because they weren't fit to survive in this world."
Fitness to survive in the world has nothing to do with it. A meteor falls, and everything with a body mass greater than 100kg dies out. Were the larger animals less fit? A volcano erupts. A species dies. A flood wipes out a nesting ground. Chalk up another one. Human sailors bring in rats, goats and row plants, destroying practically all native flora and fauna of whole island chains.
Were any of these things destroyed because they were less fit? Of course not. If your building catches on fire, are the survivors more "fit" or are they simply lucky enough to be working on the first floor?
Despite the pitifully bad dialog of Jurassic Park, natural history does not represent some featureless plain on which species struggle against each other and the best win out. Catastrophes happen. Climates make sudden, radical shifts. Disease runs rampant. New vegetation suites are established. Chance is everywhere.
And chance is all it takes. Abandon any idea that the creatures you see around you are "better" than what came before. Different? Sure. Better? By what standards? They're here because of chance built on chance, built on chance. Feedback loops tend to enforce the status quo, keeping many species stable over millions of years (a feature generally absent for the last 12,000 years) but the best predator on Earth can't live if all the prey die and forest dwellers die when the forest goes bye.
The Thylacine happened to be a predator on an island where humans decided to raise sheep. It was fully "fit" in the environment before this point. Afterwards, it was "unfit" in the sense that it's hide was not bulletproof and it had an unfortunate predilection for traps.
Should we worry about the return of extinct species? At some point, yes, but not because some anthropomorphic "nature" selected them for extinction. We should worry because these creatures may be all too "fit" and have behaviors, breeding strategies, or feeding habits that are exceptionally successful in a modern setting.
Do you oppose the return of Grey Wolves to the Yellowstone Basin, or the reintroduction of Grizzlies to their historic range? Like the thylacine, these are creatures that have been absent from these territories for multiple generations. And the areas to which they are being "returned" have often experienced radical changes in the intervening years. Watching the ups and downs of these "reintroduction" projects should give us a good preview of the pitfalls to avoid when someone wants to put just a few Mastadons in Missouri.
Note that the rats were already an introduced species that had devestated the island wildlife. The mongoose is notable only in that the introduction was deliberate. You want to see real destruction, take a look at what pigs have done to the islands.
As others have correctly pointed out, this isn't cloning. they are taking the genes of an organism and assembling them on an "artificial" chromosome.
The technology to do this is really in its infancy. Few other, if any, organisms have been prepared this way (to my knowledge), including the lowly bacteria (several orders of magnitude easier). The only research I know of that really has had success is the reduction of E.coli genome as published recently in Genome Research.
I highly doubt that we understand the marsupial genome enough to assemble it together in a way that will "work" (an enormous project by itself). This all has to be performed before the difficult cloning event (cloning the "artificial" genome into another working host cell).
While I believe the technology will be available, it will be a long time before we actually see this projects completion. To get there it is going to require a lot of grunt work. And unlike programming, bugs will be *very* difficult to weed out. If it doesn't work it might be because gene #1 and gene #23,423 aren't next to each other. How would you find this out? I applaud the effort, but I think we need to have a model of this technology on a simpler organism (not extinct) before anyone should spend crap loads of $$$ on a potential dead end.
-Sean
I think we are all forgetting that if we can bring an animal back from extinction, they could repeal the endangered species laws.... Think of all the kewl killin...
tigers, lions, bald eagles, condors, hippos, elephants, siverback gorillas.... I could make my den look like it aughtta look and take down all my Franklin Mint crap!
This is just the atheist's version of the religious argument that science should "not play God." Something infinitely wiser than us has not ordained that something should be, therefore man should not rightly make it be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sure, but ...
our actions are the result of the evolution, our actions towards the evolution are caused by the evolution.
Grossly oversimplifies things, and ...
Thus, our actions towards the evolution are either bad or good.
Doesn't make any sense. Maybe you meant "neither bad nor good"? (That wouldn't make sense either, really.)
Maybe the Tazmanian Tiger will go after the Cane Toads.
I don't see why anyone is worried about the implications of reviving an extinct species. Whatsa matter; you afraid a T-rex will devour your new BMW or something?
If something died off in the wild, then that means it'll probably die off again if it escapes into the wilderness. And if it doesn't die off, so what? We can just revive whatever species it kills off and introduce a new game animal into the forests at the same time.
I just know all you fellow gun enthusiasts out there want to go dino-hunting with a Barrett rifle. I sure do.
Excerpt from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)
The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight into the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentlemen in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet at a half- penny theater.
With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem - food and clothing "for us," eating grass and daisies white by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan, whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants, hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of insignificant things.
But if we should ask these profound expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals - lions, tigers, alligators - which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these? Oh no! Not at all! These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him? Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic, or in some way connected with the first garden.
Now, it never seems to occur to these far- seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patch-work of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.
This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.
Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?
But I have wandered from my subject. I stated a page or two back that man claimed the earth was made for him and I was going to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not made for him. When an animal from a tropical climate is taken to high latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates. No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the cause of the difficulty, though she may never have seen a fever district; or will consider it a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of sin.
Furthermore, all uneatable and uncivilized animals, and all plants which carry prickles, are deplorable evils which, according to closes researches of clergy, require the cleansing chemistry of universal planetary combustion. But more than aught else mankind requires burning, as being in great part wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt and purify us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the tophetization of the erratic genius Homo were a consummation devoutly to be prayed for. But, glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.
you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in your group.
In the realm of Theology "rising from the dead" always carries with it the idea of the *entire* person rising from the dead. (Body/Soul/Spirit)
Without the personality/mind/memories its just atoms grouped in the exact same form as a previous bunch of atoms.
Which leaves us with the bigger question. Do people have souls which are immaterial? (I believe they do) and you can't clone something that isn't contained in DNA....
Just my
http://www.ris.net/~tony/ppigeon.html
Crocodile Hunter: *in Australian accent* We're here in the Outback to see a REAL LIVE TASMANIAN *TIGER*! This is REAL dangerous stuff, so we'd best be CAREFUL!
Si metrum non habet, non est poema.
Juassic Park, anyone? Count on it
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
and thank Pele for the introduction of Kaluaha into the culture, without it, the Luaua pig just would taste like chicken ;)
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
To address your comments, the reason why cloning animals is difficult has a lot to do with what is called epigenetics, or information stored in the chromosomes that is beyond the mere sequence of the genome. For example, reversible modifications to the chromosomes that activate or inactivate certain regions during the process of cell differentiation. "Cloning" a multicellular organism is the name given to de-differentiating existing adult cells all the way back to the differentiation state of a fertilized egg, then growing them back up into adult organisms. However, even if you have the genome 100% correct, problems with the structure of the chromosomes will lead to horrible birth defects (some textbook examples of this in humans are Angelman's and Praeder-Willi syndromes, which cause mental retardation and characteristic deformities).
The thing is, what they are proposing to do with this extinct marsupial is actually not cloning, but actually synthesizing DNA molecules and building one of these animals FROM SCRATCH. This makes the problem of chromosomal structure MUCH more significant than it is when you "clone" an animal using standard techniques. To address your second point, however, it is extremely unlikely they would try to turn a related animal into the extinct animal like they did in Jurassic Park. First of all, this would not work, and second, even if it did, you would just get a different third animal. The real obstacle here is creating artificial chromosomes out of individual genes, and this is where the work would have to start. Most likely, this would not be done in cells from some exotic mammal, but something very standard like a mammalian tumor cell line or maybe even yeast.
As for your third point, a female mammal can be cloned from a male in theory, and you could breed them. Obviously this is not a perfect arrangement, but it is the case with certain strains of genetically identical lab mice, and they're generally healthy. In any case, the small problems here pale in comparison to the giant problem of assembling artificial chromosomes. This hasn't even been done with bacteria, much less a multicellular eukaryotic organism.
I used PVR to clone Tasmanian tiger but fox sure got pissed.
:=|
Maybe you live in interesting times
Not to mention what happened to Australia after Cane Toads were introduced.
Many more examples can be found at this site and using this database
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
what's next? the jurassic park factor? :)
I don't believe there is a single living native Tasmanian. Some white guys wiped them out in 50 years and then went to work on the tigers didn't they mr local? Did they do that for survival too?
Regarding the apes killing off some other species: humans and their works reach into pretty much the whole biosphere. There's no real way that any life form could drive another to extinction without Homo sapiens being in some way implicated.
There have been mass extinctions before and humans weren't around to be responsible. This time we're slaughtering the other life forms on the planet at a horrific rate. Since Europeans colonised Australia (I'm Australian), we've wiped out or nearly wiped out large numbers of unique marsupials (there are lots more kinds of marsupials than just koalas and red kangaroos). The settlers didn't always go hunting them as happened with the thylacine, but introduced foxes, cats and rabbits (as well as land clearing) did most of the damage.
Perhaps we should consider whether we are stewards of the planet, rather than masters or exploiters. Thylacines didn't have a chance to adapt: they were hunted by European settlers. There's also some possibility that they were susceptible to dog-borne diseases, analogous to American First Peoples or Australian Aborigines encountering smallpox for the first time.
Having bits of DNA to put back together is all well and good but they dont hep to clone an animal. What you need are chromosomes. Chromosomes are a complicated structure consisting of a protein scafold that the DNA is wrapped around. We still dont know the structure of the proteins in chromosomes, but we do know that it changes with time. There is a complicated interplay between the DNA and the chromosome proteins, as yet not very well characterised. Its all very well to grow up bits of DNA in varius bugs, but it can never give you the whole chromosomes you need for cloning. In my opinion the technology to do this is way more then 10 years away. I hope I am wrong. I hear this story every year, I suspect they are applying for grants again...
You can read the Tasmanian version of the story here. Including a really neat picture of the last Tassie Tiger.
;0)
We Tasmanians all grew up seeing pics of this little guy, there's also some really neat footage of him pacing around in his cozy cement floored cage. Good to see they made him comfortable in his final days
He liked it so much, now he's coming back for more!
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
Well.. ever since I saw that house-hippo on TV... I've wanted one.
I think a miniature elephant would just ROCK. About the size of a toy poodle.
I hear the New Zealand Moa, like a large chicken, is really tasty. I wonder if they'll bring them back in time for Thanksgiving?
Azurite is fine covellite is mine.
Farmers kulled it into extinction, that is why we want to bring it back, to fix up our mistakes, not just because we can.
Trust me, I know, I live in Victoria, Australia (not in Tasmania, where the tassie tigers were, but close enough).
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
I've posted about this in previous thread on this subject, but here goes again.
Cloning this animal is a BAD IDEA, for a number of reason:
1) It gives people the idea that they don't actually have to protect exisiting endangered species - after all, if we fuck up and kill them all, we can just clone them again later, right? This kind of use of genetic technology mean that we don't have to take responsibilty for wiping things out. The thylacine should stay dead, for no other reason than as a reminder of our own foolishness.
2) Even if they do manage to clone an animal, they only have retrievable DNA of one thylacine (or at most 2 or 3, if stories about other viable preserved DNA samples turning up in museums are to be believed). Which means we are going to have a single thylacine cloned endlessly, becoming a zoo sideshow, and never reintroduced into the wild, much like animals in zoos are now. The same rhetoric would surface about animals in zoos "protecting the species", but lets be honest - no endangered zoo animal or any of its zoo-bred descendents are ever going to be reintroduced into the wild, meaning this argument is a furphy.
If we cannot produce a viable, self-sustaining population of these animals, then really, what is the point? If we can't give the animal the dignity of being a viable species, then at least give it the dignity of being a regretful memory. Being a genetic freakshow for the pleasure of humans without any hope of surviving on its own would be the worst kind of existence.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
News of this project gave us something to talk about in the lab. We were trying to figure out, even theoretically how they might be planning to procede. For the non-scientists, here's a decent analogy:
You know that streets are made from asphault with lanes marked by lines of paint. You have learned to make streets from raw materials and a steamroller (PCR). You now feel ready to reconstruct New York using a stack of tourist photos from your last visit.
In crunchy technical terms:
DNA in the cell is in the form of chromosomes, which are millions and millions of nucleotides long. They are packaged into the cell's nucleus by wrapping them around proteins called histones, to form nucleosomes, classically described as 'pearls on a string'. This in turn is packaged into ever higher order structures (about which we get increasingly fuzzy in our understanding) all the way up to chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs, with I believe, 3 billion bases between them. Large spans of chromosomes are full of repeating segments, the so called "junk" DNA. While it doesn't encode any genes, there is a very good chance it plays a role in structure and regulation, which we are largely oblivious to.
Considering this, you get some idea of how little it means that we can retreive genes using PCR. Even if we could sequence the entire genome from 100 year old pickled cells, we lack the capacity to assemble it into chromosomes. Conventional cloning has so far relied on being able to take a nucleus from a live donor cell and implant it into an egg. Although the specimins they have were stored in ethanol (which good at preserving DNA), they would have to find, extract, and "revive" an intact preserved nucleus. I'm not even sure what "revive" would mean in this case. Perhaps it could be rehydrated (ethanol replaced with aqueus buffer) and implanted into a living cell. Some cancer cell lines tolerate being multi-nucleated, and the cell's repair mechanisms might help restore the nucleus to working order. Or it might just apoptose (self-destruct). Regardless, this is speculation of the highest order.
Anyway, I could ramble a bit more, but hopefully I've made my point. I certainly wish them well, I think this is some really neat science.
Entropy gets everyone.
The big issue here is that this project will divert tens of millions of dollars of badly needed funds away from the conservation of various *currently living* species which are now endangered. So while spending up big on a probably futile attempt to "bring back" the thylacine, other species may be lost.
Also I'd be surprised if personal glory isn't also a big motivator for the researchers involved, above any conservation motives. There are no doubt other (lower-profile) species that this could've been attempted with if it was just a matter of determining whether such a thing is possible.
thats kind of a lame argument...
It's as lame as mine, "if we can kill it, we can bring it back"...
I say, get it on.
Bring back New Zealand's giant eagles...
Yup, lets bring it back. We as humans killed it, so we should bring it back.
Sure, lots of animal species die out for all manner of reasons but we have good reason to keep the animals as they are today, like they are today.
One can say that they, the tigers, didn't survice because they hadn't evolved bullet proof coats, but what does that really matter??
If too many of the animals and plants around today die, we die! We are still 100% dependant on the natural world - remove too many bricks from the over cliche'd pyramid of life, and the thing crumbles...now, this act won't be the end of the world...nor the end of animals or plants...but if could be the end of my current standard of living, and my ability to post articles on Slashdot, let alone eat.
So I say, lets keep the current animals current! Lets stop evolution as much as possible - the animals lucky enough to be alive today help keep us fed, warm and happy, so lets keep them alive! Bring back the dodo as well, and quit hunting elephants!
One thing that interests me...
We went over PCR recently in a Biochemical Genetics lab. Apparently, the primer oligonucleotides can only be up to 3000 base pairs apart or so for the process to work effectively.
If this is the case, replicating the millions/billions of bases you'd have to recover to reconstruct the organism would surely be a daunting task.
Or are there any other PCR techniques more powerful than the standard 2nd year University ones we study? Would some Celera style shotgun approaches be applicable here?
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I think this is a good use of cloning technology. It's not dangerous like Jurassic Park, but we still need to be careful not to create a monster in the cloning process. While I'm all for cloning, I do fear the mistakes that are sure to come out of it, especially mutations.
I wonder how close one could ever get to recreating the Tasmanian tiger, or any other extinct species.
The whole extracting-dino-DNA-from-fossil-amber concept is a washout. DNA that old isn't available. I think the only species which could be cloned back into life are those which have left some fairly recent remains - like dodos, the moa, perhaps mammoths, passenger pigeons, the great auk, giant grizzlies.
;)
My personal prediction for a Real Soon Now cloning project is Phar Lap
Or mice, for that matter... I saw a show about mice in Australia... there were so many they were falling out of a wall like a liquid. Incredible. They could empty a grain bin in like 30 seconds.
End of lesson. You may press the button.