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Scientists Manage Interspecies Birthing
Kinthelt writes "For the first time, an animal of one species gave birth to another species. Not only that, but they also used a frozen embryo. " The species was an American short-haired cat birthing an African wildcat. Similar size and weight ranges which helped the birth go successfully. I've heard that this is the method they are considering using for mammoth birthing - using an African or Indian female elephant to implant a woolly mammoth embryo. It's going to be a lot harder to create that embryo though, unlike the wildcat which was created naturally.
Inter-species breeding is not what is being talked about here. The embryo in this case is pure wildcat, it was just implanted and gestated inside a domestic cat... and that's what is far-fetched.
/\ X | O M
I'm not sure this is the first time we've had an interspecies birth; I seem to recall a mare giving birth to a live zebra....
The Kulturwehrmacht
Finding God in a Dog
Funny.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Here's a take on this. If this is possible, and it would work between human and primate, what this opens the door to is a no-fuss pregnancy for the working woman. Donate an egg. Donate a sperm. Incubate. Place in primate. Carry to term. Deliver. All the joys of having a child of your own without the fuss of pregnancy. Pretty out there, but the possibility would seem to exist. And you know there has to be a market for it.
Doesn't this sort of thing (inter-species breeding, that is) happen all the time in suburban neighborhoods? I mean, dogs..... ....most species of dogs are "mixes" of other species.
Sorry, not so. The various dog breeds are all members of canis familiarus - all the same species. There's a lot of variation within the species due to dogs being specially bred for one and another purpose, but they are technically a single species. So no, this isn't just like dogs mating.
Although it *is* kind of similar to what happens when e.,g. a horse mates with a donkey to produce a mule. The mule foal isn't the same species as the dam.
Can be attributed to the very large genetic diversity in wolves, as well as inbreeding. There was a documentary about this the other night, and it described most types of dogs today being products of years of inbreeding and breeding with other types of dogs. However, the early forms of this specialized breeding relied on the huge genetic diversity of wolves, though wolves don't look too much different than eachother, carry radically different traits in different parts of the world.
- Mothers cannot take transplants from their children without risking rejection like everyone else.
- Reactions against some fetal tissues in utero do occur, and can kill the fetus before or shortly after birth; RH-incompatibility is one of them (RH-negative mother gives birth to an RH-positive child, gets some mixing of blood during birth, develops antibodies to RH-positive blood cells, future RH-positive foetii develop anemia due to immune attack and do not survive).
There's a biochemical jiu-jitsu that the fetus plays with the host's immune system, otherwise none of us would have lived long enough to be born. As long as two species are similar enough at the molecular level for this well-refined scheme to function correctly, immune rejection of the fetus should not be a show-stopper.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
This gives whole new meaning to the phrase, "Gee your mom's a bitch."
-AP
The wildcat, along with a few other species, is actually one of the presumed ancestors to the modern domestic feline. And other inter-species breeding successes are common, though often produce genetic mutations.
For example, mules are horses bred with donkeys. They however are sterile and cannot reproduce on their own.
Also, Tiger Haven has a liger, a lion bred with a tiger. Like a mule, it is also a mutation and not a survivable species on it's own.. But having one species give birth to another or a hybrid is not that far fetched.. It was just a matter of somebody doing it.
The first thought that entered my head after the intial 'Gee Whiz' was "I wonder if there is another specieces close enough to humans to try this with, or one that could be genetically engineered to use for that purpose. Since ppl seem to be going to great lengths to overcome infertility, they may be able to get past the initial "ewww, a monkey" feelings to try this.
I think it is wonderful that technology can overcome some infertility, but the cross species troubles with viruses in recent decades makes this a particularly fightening path. Maybe such hosts would merely be used during research and never brought to term, but ethics aside, the bridge this gives micro-organisms from other primates to humans is something i don't think we want to provide. I really wonder how this will be used.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
> Dogs and coyotes may be "subspecies" of each
> other, as well as wolves; it's all a tangled
> mess.
Actually I have heard the argument (and agree with
it) that There is only Wolves. "Dogs are the
Same species and do not deserve their own
designation.
They are just horribly inbred to the point that
up to 20% of "Pure Breed" dogs have what would
otherwise be very rare genetic diseases in
wild wolves.
I supose you could call them a "Cultivar"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Thats mostly because your not inbreeding them.
Sexual life thrives on diversety. When mice
are given the choice of mating with a mouse
with similar immune system genes to them or
one with differnt genes...they pick the
differnt one.
"Pure Breeds" are just inbred. Its like the old
wisdom goes "You have sex with your sister, and
end up with stupid kids with buck teeth who
only fuck chickens" (I forget where I got that
quote from)
If you make a gene pool to small..it stagnates.
The whole idea of "Purebreds" is to amplify
certain "desirable" genes, many of which are
normally recessive.
Unfortunaly when you do that...you amplify the
recessive diseases too. The individuals get
less and less healthy over several generations.
Adding "new genes" to the pool replentishes their
pool.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Fully 99% of all the species that have ever existed on earth are extinct. Natural selection is not some kind of judge deciding what has more worth to live than others, it is a random walk through environment-space. In nature, species go extinct because they're not suited to the changing environment (like North America joining up with South America, and all the North American mammals sucessfully competing for food with the now-extinct South American marsupials). It is not a question of being "weak". It is dumb luck (like the case above) that changes the environment, and hence changes the total set of species existing in that environment. We are now at the point where the environment isn't changing us, we are changing the environment in a non-geological time scale. I think it is noble to pursue science that will enable us to save a species from a currently changing environment (possibly caused by us) sometime in the future.
Regardless of all this sentimentality, all the bother about Mammoths and the ilk is "hot press" - interesting stories that get the public's attention (and funding dollars). The science behind all the fanfare is certainly worth pursuing. It will teach us much about the environment around us, and a hell of a lot about ourselves. It has applications across the board, even including space travel. When the public hears about "lets ressurect a mammoth" or "housecat gives birth to wildcat", some people get all up in arms about "why are we spending money on this?" The real point of these aren't the mammoths or the wildcats, its the science advancing that is allowing us to do this. Other people will think "Maybe now I will be able to have a child, too!", some will think "we can use this to transport animal species to other worlds at lower costs", and still others will think "I should write another sequel to Jurassic Park".
Sit back a moment, get past the "mammoths in zoos" hype, and think about all the things this advancement could mean.
In the end, it is contributing to our technological capabilities. Who knows, maybe after all is said and done, perhaps a species we'll wind up saving will be our own.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
Clearly, cloning TRex and turning them loose would be a mistake.
Why do you say that? Been watching Jurassic Park too many times? Or maybe Godzilla? Species? Mimic? If you watch enough dumb movies, you might get the idea that resurrecting a species like T. Rex through cloning would cause The End Of The World when they (inevitably) get out of control and eat everybody. Sure, there would be a devastating ecological impact, but nothing that would threaten the survival of humanity. If you dropped a couple of full-grown ones in the middle of a city, they would eat a bunch of people and otherwise cause a big commotion for a few days until they were killed, but that's about it. It's not like they'd breed covertly in the countryside, rising up a few years later by the millions to wreak righteous vengeance upon us for all the species we've destroyed.
It's not even clear that they would cause that much damage to the ecosystem. They're big, tough, and eat a lot, so you'd think they'd screw up the food chain, i.e., displace whoever is currently the top predator, but then maybe they wouldn't even do that well. First of all, the climate is very different from what they were adapted to. Also, the countryside is no longer full of schoolbus-sized, walnut-brained herbivores for them to eat. They'd have a hard time chasing down the much smaller, faster animals that exist now, especially since they'd have to catch so many more of them. I don't know if they'd even be able to survive, so "turning them loose" might be cruel to them, but it wouldn't be dangerous to us. On the other hand, cloning them for scientific purposes would be of great interest, and the amusement park idea actually just might not be too bad either.
That said, what makes cloning the mammoth any better? Did we drive them to extinction? I thought the climate did that. Either way, what unsuspecting ecosystem were you planning to drop them into? Seems the ecological impact would be just as bad -- maybe worse, since they would probably have a better chance of flourishing and thus doing some damage.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Biologists working in unregulated laboratories south of the border have long been experimenting with techniques and materials forbidden in the United States for ethical or political reasons. Fetal-cell transplants for treatment of Parkinson's disease has been impossible to obtain in the US, but is commonly practiced here. Now forbidden science threatens to overshadow forbidden medicine.
At a press conference in Mexico City, Dr. Xavier Cojones announced a breakthrough in cross-species gestation. "Other scientists have managed to bring the offspring of one species to term in the womb of another, but my team has successfully fertilized a hybrid of two species and gestated it inside a third. As these species never mate naturally, this is truly unprecedented."
According to the press release, Cojones and his team have crossed the Common Geek (Bitfiddleus Obsessivus) with a Trial Lawyer (Ambulancus Chaserium) and gestated the resulting embryo in an Education Major (Lowtestscorus Unemployablus). Despite their outward similarity no cross between any of these is known to have occurred; in nature, these species badmouth, snub, or sue each other to death nearly every time they meet.
The key breakthrough was in the collection and handling of the gametes and embryo. Cojones and his team claim to have achieved heretofore-unseen success in gestation of such crosses. "Our big advance was in thinking to try using an Education Major as the host-mother. The current conditions for their species are very grim, and evolution has primed their systems to be very receptive to any chance to be involved with juveniles," Cojones said. "Given the proper opportunity, embryos take very well and thrive."
Asked about the gamete donors, Cojones explained "The key is to find good specimens of each species in their natural habitat and at the peak of their natural cycle. While it is often difficult to tell when a Geek is fertile, we found that it was not at all difficult to obtain sperm from them. Under the influence of a Quake and Corona hangover, many of them will leave perfectly good samples the next morning. Linux Installfests are particular good hunting grounds for this sort of thing. Getting ova from the Lawyer was done by offering the chance to be a plaintiff in a class-action suit against private adoption agencies. This urge of lawyers to eat their own does have its scientific uses."
The last question of the press conference was about future challenges for the team. Cojones replied, "We are going to revisit some of our failures and see if we can't learn something from them. For two years we attempted to cross a Geek with a rat, without success. We finally had to turn to lawyers for ova, because there are some things even a rat won't do."
Copyright (c) 1999 United Perversion International. All rights reversed.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Outlandish, interspecies dog breeding is not a particularly new concept. For example, the Taco Bell restaurant chain recently bred Cheech Marin and a chihuahua to produce their latest mascot.
.. Dave's not here"
"Drop the chalupa, man
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Mendax Veritas dun said:
1) No, it's not an urban legend; wolf-hybrids do exist and in fact there are actually registries for wolf-hybrids. (In most areas, there are special licensing requirements if they're over 50 percent wolf--basically the same requirements that you'd be under if you kept a full-blooded wolf--but yes, they exist.)
2) Wolves and dogs are the same species.
I'll repeat that for those of you who didn't get it--
Wolves and dogs are the same species.
Yes, I'm serious. :) Dogs and wolves (and dogs and coyotes, and if memory serves dogs and jackals) have long been known to interbreed; however, until fairly recently zoological nomenclature insisted on not only listing all these as different species but also listed "primitive dogs" like dingos as a separate species as well!
Fortunately, zoological nomenclature (specifically the ICZN) has corrected this, and ALL of these have now been sunk into subspecies of Canis lupus. Most breeds of dogs are now listed as Canis lupus familiaris (some breeds derived from "primitive dogs" like dingos, Australian cattle dogs, etc. are listed as Canis lupus dingo), coyotes have been sunk to Canis lupus latrans, red wolves (which may well be a hybrid of coyotes and wolves) are listed now as Canis lupus rufus, etc.
ObThread: For that matter, cats have been sunk too. Cats are now listed in newer versions of nomenclatures as Felis sylvestris domestica; African wildcats (from which house kitties are derived) are listed as Felis sylvestris lybica and European wildcats are listed as Felis sylvestris europeensis(?).
And FWIW, this is also NOT the first time an animal has give birth to an animal of another species. In the 1980's a horse at the Louisville Zoological Gardens gave birth to a Grant's zebra after having had the zebra embryo artificially implanted; this was specifically meant to give a way to breed more zebras, especially rare species. (The zebra who had a horse for a mom, E.Q., is (I believe) still living at the Louisville Zoo, btw. Incidentially, horses and zebras are even more distantly related than horses and donkeys; a semi-striped zebra known as a quagga (which looked a lot like a crossbreed between a donkey and a zebra) existed till humans hunted them to extinction in the 1800s. There is supposedly a captive breeding program in place in South Africa breeding quagga-like zebras to each other in an attempt to bring back quaggas (of a sort); I've also heard this same technique proposed to bring back mammoths.)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Like something out of the Onion?
funny you should say that, they had a story one week about a man who was complaining about not being able to breed his cats - no matter what he tried they wouldn't have kittens. I'm sure you can guess the punchline...
(he was performing the process himself!)
It was appalling and hilarious. Alas, it doesn't seem to be in their online archives.
I concur with most of my fellow slashdot readers that this technology can be useful for bringing species to greater numbers that may be extinct. Aside from that, I'm more interested in the relationship between the mother and offspring. A domesticated cat raising a breed of wild cats? I think this should be extremely interesting to follow how the domesticated mother can keep up with her new offspring. This is all assuming if they do not take the offspring away from the mother. On one hand I feel that taking her away from the mother may be beneficial because sooner or later those wild instincts will set in and may do things the mother may not like. It is true the mother probally has these instincts, but I feel that they are mostly put in the back because of years and years of domestication.
But on the other maybe the mother and offspring should not be seperated. I think that it would be a worthy endeavor to observe how she copes with her unusual offspring.
We've known about a second species of man for a LONG time - well.. atleast the phone company knows about this species. How else do you explain the awesome stupidity that happens whenever you work tech support? Normal people aren't this stupid, I don't think. I swear, there's a built-in mechanism to route this species' problems directly to your phone. Echelon, eat yer heart out....
Ligers and mules aside, this is a lot harder than it seems. The main problem isn't the actual fertilization, it's how the mother would deal with bearing a child of another species within itself. Presumably the (progesterone? I'm no biochemist) that the embryo secretes to inhibit reactions from the mother would be contained in proportion suited to a native species. It also might explain why crossbreeds are sterile. Once again, I am not a biochemist or geneticist, so I could be wrong.. However, I'd say that managing to pull this off was great, considering that our technology STILL isn't good enough to prevent organ rejections 100% of the time, I'm pretty sure cross-species gestation is probably an order of magnitude more touchy!
Good job to the doctors who pulled this off. Perhaps the technology that went into this can go into preventing organ rejections?
Or at the very least, that half-man half-lizard race of supermen I've been desigining in my basement will be ready to help me take over the world. Shit, was I thinking out loud again?
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
A recent show about dogs, on either TLC or Discovery, made the point of saying that all dog breeds, from the chiuhuahua (sp? new breed?) to the Great Dane, to the Timber Wolf, are geneticaly the same. The argument given was that all breeds are descended from wolves, with controlled interbreeding to bring out certain traits (size, hair length and color) while removing others (temper?). The difference is in appearance only.
:)
The implied parallel to humans is ethnicity, skin, hair and eye color.
Now, no one but the most radical racist would dare claim that Jews and Blacks and Nordic Blondes are different species, or that mulato children are inter-species hybrids that (oddly) are not sterile.
Human breeds, dog breeds and cat breeds are genetically equivalent. This being limited to the domestic cat and dog, but...
As per the dog show, since domesticated dogs are just wolves bred to present specific traits; then how are domestic cats NOT wild cats bred to bring out their particular traits?
And if they are just that, then, genetically, they are equivalent, and so inter-breedable.
Now, it's interesting that frozen embryos were used, and that the common house cat might be used as an incubator for some African breed (BREED not species) that's teetering on the brink of extinction. But so what? If they're the same species then take an African kitty, and a gender appropriate ferral domestic (since a house cat would end up dead), play some soft music and just let nature take it's course.
Sure, size matters, we can't inter-breed an occelot with a siamese, just as we can't breed the aforementioned TacoBell chiuwawa (new breed for sure!) and Marmaduke; but there's room for natural accomodation.
What's lab got to do with it? (Sorry, listening to Tina
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Unlike the original post said, they did -not- use a frozen embryo, the fertilized embryos were frozen, stored for a week, thawed, -then- implanted. (Done as an additional proof-of-concept)
It appears that they are still a long way off, from my reading of the article, from bringing back a Wooly Mammoth, or for that matter, a surrogate mothers for a totally different genus. (ex: A lab cow carrying a tiger kub..) But, you can't walk without taking little steps I suppose.
None of those three are likely to be practical.
1) As for randomly changing the genes, first you have to know the genome (unless you want to take on the astronomically time-consuming and expensive task of taking wild shots in the dark, and it'll take thousands of years to learn the genome by then thanks to the time lag introduced by this technique). In order to know the genome, you need live samples to study. Extinct species by definition have no live samples, so you can't study the genome.
2) Keeping on cloning: that doesn't really solve the problem. So you have a few animals in zoos; if all of the specimens of a given species are in captivity then the species may as well be extinct; it is no longer a part of nature.
3) Getting more samples: You do, of course, realize that in all the time we've searched for wooly mammoth DNA, we've only ever found one specimen with most of its DNA left.
In other words, once a species is extinct there's nothing you can do. It is gone. A sobering thought, to be sure, and a good reason to preserve what species we still have.
Pairs of chromosomes can swap "sections" at times
("Crossing over"). The question then is - can
wooly-mammoth-compatible chromosomes be harvested
or "built" from existing (presumably elephant)
species? If so, this would provide some biodiversity to work with.
Theoretically, one can get a few different genotypes from the one specimen, IF a technically
feasible way to pick and choose individual chromosomes is ever worked out (How many pairs of chromosomes do wooly mammoths have, anyway?)
It is possible to fuse protoplasts (plant cells with the cell walls removed) from different plant species and sometimes get a viable plant as a result...could some form of biological "nuclear fusion" be used to mix chromosomes artificially between animal cells?
Fun stuff!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
See this link or this one for a terrific discussion of all this. The Encylopædia Britannica also has a long article. Here's a less technical bit on monotremes in general plus specific links for the echidnas and platypus. Lastly, here's a brief write-up on the sleep of the platypus.
Informatively yours, :-)
I am embarrassed for scientists everywhere, when one of them makes a statement like this:
;-)
'Scientists are not sure yet how long frozen embryos can be kept, but Dresser said they might be good for hundreds of thousands of years.
"If this technology had been available during the age of the dinosaurs, we might have dinosaurs today," she said. '
Now I have a mental image of dinosaurs running around in lab coats, freezing their own embryos to forestall extinction! Or would that have been the little rodent mammals harvesting the saurian embryos?
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
- Randomly change genes: With knowledge of the cloned animals' genome, you could cause minor mutations that could be used in the place of biodiversity. The only problem is mutating it 'just right' - so that it doesn't kill the creature. Not to mention that we don't exactly have that kind of advanced knowledge yet.
- Just keep cloning: You don't have an ecosystem of cloned animals, you've got a zoo or three that have a clone of the same animal. Whenever you need a new one, you just clone from the original specimen, or clone one of the clones. This doesn't, however, solve the problem of reintroducing them into the ecosystem.
- Get more samples If you had DNA from enough specimens, you could clone a biologically diverse group. The only problem is that we have trouble getting enough DNA for one specimen....
Personally, I'd like to see this kind of thing happen. If we can preserve species which are dying off, then perhaps we can bring them back at some future date when (if) we stop tearing their habitats down.-Denor