SYDNEY (dpa) – So you thought cloning Dolly the sheep was complex science?
Try bringing back to life the thylacine, a curious dog-like creature that was declared extinct when the last of its line died in an Australian zoo 66 years ago.
A team at the Australian Museum in Sydney is claiming it is on the way to cloning the thylacine after managing to make multiple copies of four of its genes.
But there are probably 30,000 genes to go before the team can get close to resurrecting a creature that had the head of a dog, the stripes of a tiger and the hindquarters of a hyena.
The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial and is popularly called the Tasmanian tiger. It roamed the mainland of Australia until about 2,000 years ago when wild dogs that had arrived 2,000 years before and drove it out of all areas but the mountain fastness of Tasmania.
The DNA the team is working on was taken from a dead pup put into a jar of alcohol in 1866 at a time when there were still tens of thousands of thylacines roaming Tasmania.
When the whole genome is reconstructed, the plan is to implant an egg in a surrogate mother from another species of animal that looks a bit like a thylacine.
Some have scoffed at the claim of team leader Mike Archer that the end of extinction is nigh, that species hunted to death can be brought back to life.
A group of geneticists at Genpole, a campus af biotechnolgy laboratories near Paris, has dismissed the Australian claims as autrageous.
Genpole scientists said in a statement: “There are no grounds for thinking that one day it will be possible to reproduce a creature as complex as the Tasmanian tiger by introducing DNA fragments, however numerous and complex they may be, in a denucleated egg.”
Archer, a palaeontalogist rather than a geneticist, has come close to admitting that he may have gone overboard in trying to whip up publicity for a research project that is also a documentary to be shown on the Discovery Channel.
“Well, we’re certainly not there,” he said. “But we are on a path that we hope will get us there.”
Some protest that even the act of hoping is a mistake. They claim that Archer is holding out an easy solution to difficult problems created by the destruction of the environment.
If extinct species can be brought back to life in a test tube, they argue, people won’t feel as bad about loss of habitat.
The case against even attempting to clone the thylacine is put by Nick Money, who is in charge of the forests where the last thylacine was born.
“Offering what appears to be a quick-fix technical solution can let people off the hook, buying their way out of the hard slog of improving how we deal with the natural environment,” said Mooney, the wildlife manager for the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Mooney, like others, sees the hype surrounding the project to clone the thylacine as at best a blast of publicity to get the Australian Museum’s turnstyles spinning faster. At worst, he says, is a distraction from the task of conservation.
