For the first time ever scientists have cloned an extinct creature from the tissue of a frozen corpse leading some to wonder if a scenario similar to the film Jurassic Park could soon be in the works. Though it wasn’t a dinosaur emerging from an egg designed by scientists, the impact on the scientific community is expected to be just as groundbreaking and certainly not short of controversy.
The Pyrenian Ibex is a form of mountain goat thought to be lost to the ravages of time and changing habitat forever as the last one fell ill and died in 2000. Tissue collected from the creature and lowered into a canister of liquid nitrogen kept its extinction on ice until only recently when scientists finally had the facilities to break out the sample and begin the meticulous process of bringing the extinct species back to life. Perhaps the most incredible part, is that the samples used to clone the creature were packets of DNA collected from flakes of skin.
Unfortunately the technique is not perfect as the newborn Ibex had a congenital birth defect resulting in its death shortly after it was born. Still, the technique is making many people excited for the potential the process could create for extinct and endangered animals to ensure they can be brought back to life after their death. The famous Dodo bird, for example, may some day find a new niche in a vastly different ecosystem than the one it was originally wiped out from. Alternately, we could actually go for the ultimate in mad science and attempt to clone a dinosaur from the DNA found in mosquitoes encased in amber as in the famous science fiction film/novel “Jurassic Park,” by Michael Crichton.
Additionally, if DNA were only required from the skin to make the cloning process complete, then eventually there could arise the problem of cloning human beings rather than just animals. If a human being were cloned using only a hair follicle, then how soon before the identity of any person became compromised? How soon until paternity suits arose that resulted in the outrageously complex claim that children had been cloned against the will of the defendant and that DNA evidence could potentially no longer be admissible in court?
The Raellian movement has already made the claim to have successfully created a human clone, though no evidence has ever been put forward to prove this. The Raellians have long been proponents of cloning, though their claims are highly questioned without any evidence to back them up.
Still, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that such technology could one day come about and we could one day live in a world where we see ourselves walking down the hallway as we take our pet Allosaurus for a walk. And what a world would that be to live in? Until the technology is perfected, this will be a difficult to imagine dream, but it becomes more and more clear that the existence of a world of cloned extinct creatures is merely a matter of time.