"Fresh Effort to Clone Extinct Animals"
11/22/13
bbc.com/culture
We did it again! The human race has singlehandedly managed
to wipe out an entire population of mountain goats, called bucardos, in the
high mountains of Spain. These majestic creatures of the Iberian Peninsula
became extinct through continuous hunting and loss of habitat. Luckily, the
last surviving bucardo, Celia, was captured by scientists. They extracted her DNA
and froze it in liquid nitrogen in 1999. After Celia was killed by a falling
tree the following year, scientists managed to inject her nuclei into a
surrogate and successfully clone the bucardo. However, the baby calf died due
to complications at birth. Scientists are continuously working to “de-extinct”
these mountain goats by successfully cloning the bucardo a second time. This is
not an easy task since these frozen cells are extremely fragile and hard to
work with. If the scientists become successful, then perhaps they can extract
the DNA of every species of animals and store it in a special library for
safekeeping. The next time when human beings try to annihilate another
magnificent creature under the name of a “sport” called hunting, perhaps a
scientist can reach into that DNA library and save the face of humanity by
de-extincting these wonderful creatures.
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