Highland Wildcats to be Cloned
A member of the team behind cloning Dolly the Sheep back in 1996 has started work to clone rare Wildcats. The number of Wildcats is thought to be around 400, and attempts to increase their number by cloning have previously been suggested by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.
Inter-breeding with domestic cats is one of the reasons the wild numbers have dwindled, however, the domestic cat could provide the answer.
Because the Wildcat crosses with domestic cats, it is hard to find a pure bred. However, scientists have been able to use domestic cats to clone other species. Similarly, dog eggs have been used to clone wolves. Only Wildcat skin cells would be needed for the cloning process in addition to the eggs of a domestic cat.
In the Cairngorms, domestic cats are sprayed to prevent them breeding with Wildcats, and this could provide a suitable source of eggs to be used in the cloning procedure.
The RZSS’s Highland Wildlife Park stated that a hybrid of housecat/wildcat could give birth to pure breed wildcats. This, it is hoped, would help boost the numbers of the 150 breeding pairs that survive in the highlands.
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In our science class we're studying cloning and natural selection
We looked at pictures of failed disfigured clones of cows and lambs and we watched a debate about cloning. It just scares me that there are people out there who would fully risk deformed and disfigured babies (that mostly die before birth) in order to boost their ego and be named the best scientist or what not.
(Assuming scientists could clone people)
What would be the point?
If you cloned, lets say your mother who had reacently died. Yes she would look the same but you can’t clone personality. In fact it would be so unethical to force that person to be who you want them to be. It would be horrible. The reason you were brought into existence was be to play the life of someone else.
Just my thoughts
We Can Clone! Now What?
What does our embarrassing fumbling over cloning say about how realistically we understand the human condition and the future?
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Scientists clone extinct frog
guardian.co.uk
In 1983, a genuine freak of nature was lost to science. The gastric-brooding frog – Rheobatrachus silus – was native to the rainforests of Queensland, Australia and best known for giving birth through its mouth, having incubated its offspring in its stomach. But habitat loss and disease saw the species officially declared extinct.
Until now. Scientists in Australia have announced that they have brought the frog’s genome “back to life”. Employing a cloning technology called somatic cell nuclear transfer, they used tissue obtained from samples of a frog kept in a freezer since the 1970s to implant a “dead” cell nucleus into a fresh egg from a similar species.
None of the embryos created survived for more than a few days, but the “Lazarus Project” team believe their work is a landmark moment for the new science of “de-extinction” – the artificial recreation of lost species that featured fictionally in the Jurassic Park films. “Now we have fresh cryo-preserved cells of the extinct frog to use in future cloning experiments,” says team leader Professor Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. “We’re increasingly confident that the hurdles ahead are technological and not biological, and that we will succeed. Importantly, we’ve demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world’s amphibian species are in catastrophic decline.”
Dinosaur Bones: What ancient proteins can tell us about dinosaurs
thetech.orgRemember in Jurassic Park when they got dinosaur DNA from an ancient mosquito’s stomach? Well, if they had been interested in dinosaur proteins, they only had to look at a dinosaur bone.
Dinosaur bones are at least 65 million years old. And all of the meat has turned to stone. Over this amount of time and with this much abuse, scientists thought no DNA or proteins could survive. They were wrong.
Recently, scientists were able to pull proteins out of a T. rex bone. Now they have done some additional work that suggests dinosaurs are closely related to birds. It is amazing that our technology has become so sensitive that we can examine dinosaur proteins.
