Japanese Researchers Publish Study That Provides Hope of Reviving Extinct Animals– and Saving Endangered Species

It’s not quite on the scale of Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers claim that they have successfully produced clones of mice that have been frozen for 16 years.

Will this research help revive extinct animals like the woolly mammoth or saber-toothed tiger?

The findings of this fascinating study were published this week in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences. So without further ado, here’s how they brought the long dead mice back to life.

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Whoever Would Have Thought a Mouse’s Brain Cells Would Be So Useful?

Lead researcher Teruhiko Wakayama and his team accomplished their soon to be famous study by injecting DNA from the brain cells of the freezer-burned mice into empty mice eggs. From these embryos they extracted stem cells which they used to produce more embryos. Finally, they used all of this genetic material to produce more eggs which were then implanted into live female mice.

And so the mice were born from long dead members of their species!

The researchers also conducted an experiment where they successfully created new mice by injecting dead sperm into mice eggs… (sounds gross, right? The things we do for science).

Great! So When Will Pet Woolly Mammoths Be on the Market?

Hold off there, buddy. Even though this study gives us hope to revive extinct species, it would also mean we’d have to find them frozen somewhere. Oh wait, Reuters is reporting that a baby woolly mammoth was found frozen last year in the Arctic by Russian scientists. So we might be able to get brain cells, but the eggs might still be a problem. And a live animal to serve as surrogate mother. Not to mention that woolly mammoths are a tad bigger than mice, and we generally have experimented little with them.

Ok, we haven’t experimented with them at all.

And who knows if we’d want to have them around. Bad smells, perhaps? On the other hand, maybe passenger pigeons would be nice to have back though. But I’m not sure they were known for flying into ice too often.

Forget Woolly Mammoths! Can We Save Current Endangered Species?

Perhaps the more exciting application of this research would be the possibility of preserving and then cloning endangered species in the future if needed. While I think it’s clearly best to continue our attempts to stop species from going extinct through other conservation methods, I’d be happy to know that we have a backup plan that might work.

I also wonder how many species would go extinct naturally? Are we thus toying with nature’s plan? So many animals are close to extinction today because of human influences. This would probably make it challenging, if not impossible, to know when it’s actually not our fault.

There are definitely some ethical issues at play when it comes to cloning, but I’ll leave it that. Who wants to be the buzz killer for some cool research that is a sure fire conversation starter?

To read the study in its entirety, you can currently do so for free by clicking here.

Photo Credit: rpongsaj on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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