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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.
- 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
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
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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.
Brumby dun asked:
Actually, the kitties are closer than horses and zebras are; African wildcats and housecats are so closely related that they can have fertile offspring, and most modern nomenclature systems actually list both African wildcats and housecats as subspecies of Felis sylvestris.
Horses and zebras are farther apart--a cross between a horse and a zebra would be infertile, as horses are around as removed from zebras as they are from donkeys--and while equine evolution IS dynamic it's still farther than what was done with the kitties. (And yes, if memory serves, E.Q. (the Grant's Zebra who was birthed by the quarter horse) is still around at the Louisville Zoo; I've some friends who work there and I'll have to see if he's still there or not. He beats the kitties by at least ten years; the big deal with the cats was that frozen embryos were successfully used and it's the first time it's been successfully done in felids...big deal, too, because both big and small cats are hurtin' as far as habitat goes, and most wild cats are at the very least threatened species.)
What happened with the kitties was roughly equivalent to a dog being implanted with wolf puppy embryos and giving birth to a litter of wolf puppies (as opposed to Golden Retriever or Alaskan Malamute puppies). The level of relation is just as close (if not closer) between African wildcats and housecats as it is between Alaskan malamutes and wolves, down to the fact you can have wildcat/housecat crossbreeds that can have kittens, and for all intents and purposes housecats are domesticated, slightly retarded versions of African wildcats (much as dogs are heavily domesticated, retarded wolves).
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
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.