Raising the dead

Like many publications, Discover Magazine (whom I follow on Facebook) is doing a recap of their top 100 articles from 2013. #28, which they reposted today on their page, involves a pretty awesome program being done in Australia called the Lazarus project. Those familiar with the reference will get the gist of the program; for those of you who don't, it's a de-extinction program targeting the gastric-brooding frog, which was iconic in the country until its extinction in the 80s. Of course, the link is an elaborate ruse because only subscribers to the magazine can read the rest online. But as your super helpful science blogger, I have my own copy of the article :)

Alright, so it's not the official Discover Magazine article but rather one I wrote myself. If you read the About page on here, you'll remember that this blog was a continuation of a project I did for my News Editing class sophomore year. We had to create a plan for a hypothetical publication, including a full layout for it, 4 articles, and pictures. One of my articles was about de-extinction, and I was able to talk to both the guy in charge of the Lazarus Project and the guy doing similar work with passenger pigeons.

To make a long story short, what both groups are doing is interspecies cloning. Normal cloning involves taking the nucleus of a cell from one individual and putting into a nucleus-less egg of another individual, using a third individual as a surrogate in the case of mammals. For extinct species, such as the gastric-brooding frog and passenger pigeon (among many others), scientists have to take the nucleus from their tissue samples and insert them into enucleated eggs of a similar species because eggs of the extinct species obviously don't exist. As one might expect, this doesn't always work quite as well, and last I checked, the Lazarus team was stuck at the division state: the eggs would divide initially, which was pretty monumental, but they don't get much farther than that in the development process.

While de-extinction programming has both positives and negatives, it's important to keep in mind that this is still a long way off. It doesn't mean we'll have dinosaurs roaming around our towns, and it doesn't mean that we can toss aside conservation efforts. But it is a pretty neat concept.