Jacob Merkley
Mrs. Booker
English-composition 1
26 October 2014
Attack of the clones! It is a hot summer day and you are out on your back porch when all of a sudden a Wooly mammoth the size of your house walks by, what do you do? Most of us would run away as quickly as possible in panic and a fear for our lives. Unless, we were used to it. Would you be alright with having extinct species brought back to life? Even if you are not alright with it a group of scientists is already hard at work to make this happen. Though they probably will not be roaming around outside of your house.
Let us take the Bucardo for example. The Bucardo were goat like creatures they are among a large group of animals that have been pushed into extinction. They are one of the first animals’ scientists and researchers have successfully brought back from extinction. But their victory against extinction was short lived. The newly born animal died just minutes after birth because of a birth defect having to do with its lung (Sherkow, Greely). Some would call this a failure but it showed that it can be done and has real potential in the scientific community. What is really fascinating though is the way this clone came into existence and out of the darkness of extinction. First the group of scientists captured the last remaining Bucardo who happened to be a female, knowing that it was going to go extinct on account of it being the very last one of its kind. They took a sample of her ear tissue and had it frozen. They then took the DNA from the frozen tissue (Pandey) implanted it into an empty embryo which was then implanted into a surrogate mother of a species that was closely related to the Bucardo. Hence the baby Bucardo was born. What this all means is that it is possible to make something that is extinct, come back to life. It also got more people to look at cloning extinct animals as more of a serious subject and not just something out of a science fiction movie. Cloning extinct animals is a good thing, because it can give the world back animals that it has lost and it can help scientist understand how to clone animals successfully and efficiently so we have a chance of saving some animals that are on the verge of extinction.
The first successful cloning of an animal was a sea urchin. The man who did this was Hans Adolf Edward Dreisch (Learn.Genetics). Dreisch showed how to clone this organism by shaking the embryo. After being shook the embryo broke into two different cells that eventually grew into two full sea urchins (Learn.Genetics). More recently, the first mammals were cloned by Steen Willadsen (Learn.Genetics). Willadsen cloned a lamb but instead of shaking the embryo he used electric shock. Willadsen opened up unforeseen doors for the world of cloning and genetics. From there scientists kept pushing the boundaries. One of these doors led to the cloning of monkeys. As we know monkeys are the closest living relatives of humans and learning how to clone them would make a big impact on the idea that maybe someday we will be able to clone a human being. In 1997 a team of scientist led by Don Wolf started with twenty-nine embryos and implanted them into surrogate mothers (Learn.Genetics). Out of those twenty-nine only two of the monkeys survived and were successfully birthed. The madness of cloning doesn’t stop there. Some of the more “radical” scientists started experimenting with extinct animals. To bring an animal back from the eternal grave seemed impossible and to some was and still is taboo. But taboo or not there is still a select group of people think it is not just possible but extremely worth it. It is our obligation to at least try to bring back some of these animals that we helped go extinct. One of the biggest mass extinctions for example, is the extinction of Wooly mammoths. The Wooly mammoth was a massive animal that resembled a modern day elephant. A few big differences though are that the Wooly mammoth had lots of fur and were