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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.
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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 we will get a choice at the thanksgiving !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
...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.
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!
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...
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."
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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
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
yes, but not his experience.
it'd be like asking if you could recreate Michaelangelo's David from only a chip of marble... you could create the physical potential, but it was his experiences and environment that shaped him into the man we remember.
he'd be no better than the celebrity impersonators we have already.
his brain structure is lost forever.
0x0D 0x0A
While your at it, bring those dodo's back too!
It's been suggested. DNA has been extracted from the few dodo body parts that are still known to exist in museums, but the DNA is damaged. You can read more about it here.
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!
1) Don't feed them after midnight. ;)
2) Don't let them get wet.
3) For Pete's sake, the small cute ones are the reason we're in this mess. Do not be fooled by their disarming mewling sounds!
4) And this is the important one, Don't EVER forget, ancient Asian men in antique shops will always sell you something cheaply, but the cost in the long term is not worth the trouble.
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.
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...
Well, I'm pretty sure there weren't any at the zoo last time I checked...
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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.
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."
Could someone theoretically clone Abraham Lincoln from his remains?
Hard to say. It would depend a great deal on the techniques that were used to preserve his body. If I remember correctly, formaldehyde damages DNA, so if he was embalmed that way you might run into problems.
Still, it's kind of a moot point. You wouldn't end up getting Lincoln as history remembers him. You'd end up getting someone who looks like him, has his potential, and perhaps even some of the same personality quirks, but it wouldn't be him.
Dangerous animals are rarely that dangerous.
A T-Rex would look for something bigger and slower than you, raptors probably ate mostly carrion. Researchers go and live among wolves and lions all the time, and rarely are harmed. You have more to fear from the truck carrying dinosaur embryos than from cloned dinosaurs.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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.
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.
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?
And the inventor credits its discovery to LSD.
Too bad he wasn't put in Jail as a felon before its discovery. The Nobel prize could have went to someone more law-abiding. We really need tougher drug laws to get these kinds of criminals off the street.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
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.
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.
...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...
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!
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.
From the inside, perhaps.
:) You're welcome. And thank you.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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 ...
The clone wouldn't even necessarily look like him. Genetics only give a potential for physical manifestation, it's your environment that has the final say. Look at europeans from a few hundred years ago. Most were relatively tiny. Sure, some of the change in average size is due to better breeding, but with modern humans (eg homo sapiens sapiens), that's less and less a factor. Most of it has to do with nutrition and atmosphere.
funny munging
err wait.. wrong thread.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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.
And wow, even after all of those species got wiped out, the ecosystem hasn't collapsed! Either the species were redundant or they served no useful purpose. So who fucking cares if they went extinct? Humans are a natural part of existence, just like everything else. There's not such thing as an unnatural object. So what if something is man-made? Spidersilk is spider made, it doesn't occure anywhere else, so does that make it unnatural? No. If we want to start cloning extinct animals and reintroducing them, fine, but admit that we're doing it for our own amusement, so stroke our egos, or to assuage some phantom guilt. It's not necessary, it's not going to mysticly make the animal more able to survive in a world dominated by humans.
Kintanon
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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!
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.
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
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.)
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
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.
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.
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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