Recently, the Tasmanian Tiger hit the news once again–No, no, not Jaason Simmons–that Tasmanian Tiger is still all washed up after his run on Baywatch. Instead it’s time for me to tackle the news on the Tasmanian Tiger implanted DNA cells in a mouse in a less “oh my God, this is finally Jurassic Park, for real man!” kind of way.
I won’t lie though, it’s definitely what I imagined when I first read the news—almost those words exactly in hindsight actually. Let me tell you, when I watched Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park back in 1993, I was a believer that that kind of technology was coming soon to pull off exactly that kind of miracle. I still, to this day, DEMAND that science make that happen in my life time. But Science is busy people you know…
To continue, the Tasmanian Tiger was never an animal I looked into before (lets use “thylacine” for now to save on typing and the incorrect usage of the capitalized word “Tiger” throughout the article). I knew of it, sure; that wolf-thing that wasn’t really a tiger at all that went extinct at some point back in the day.
While digging around the net I discovered the black and white film of the thylacine pacing back and forth in its cage at the Hobart Zoo, filmed in 1933 by naturalist David Fleay, three years before it became extinct as a species. It was a tragic 62 seconds to know that such a beautifully screwed up looking beasty had to fall to the ignorance of man. This death of this last thylacine on 7 September 1936 was finally granted National Threatened Species Day since 1996; It is held annually on September 7th in Australia, to commemorate its death.
It looked like a thin wolf or thick coyote, a long head and intimidating jaw that opened 120 degrees wide and weighed down its equally long and powerful neck, zebra-like stripes spanned its hind-quarters, and had a tail like that of a kangaroo arched towards the ground which even allowed it to stand up on its haunches for some time.
It wasn’t feline at all. It wasn’t even canine. It was a marsupial and closer related to the Australian-native kangaroo than to either of the former species. It even had a pouch were it would raise its young, but the opening was reversed. Even the males had pouches to protect their dangling members while rampaging trough thick brush lest they wanted to self-neuter themselves in the process of chasing down their next meal.
Scientists at the Universities of Melbourne and Texas have successfully re-activated one of the thylacine’s genes (Col2a1 to be exact) in the embryo of a lab mouse. Before you get all creative, this does not mean that the mouse is going to turn into a mini Tasmanian tiger! That’s a reality dreamers like me have to invent in la-la-land in the pre-hours before actually dreaming. All the gene does is help develop cartilage and future bone in the wee mice; Col2a1 is actually a gene that can be found in most vertebrates already, including humans.
That being said, where can I volunteer to have that mojo injected into me? Whao!–unless it made my jaw drop down wide like that fat-sucking chick in Smallville season 3, screw that! I take it back!
What’s important here is that, for the first time ever, a long dead gene has been introduced into a living host that actually accepted it. From here, scientists are able to track and analyse the function of the gene for continued research into the dead gene’s behaviour, opening the doors for further scientific study of the biology of creatures thought to be long lost.
It’s interesting that almost a decade ago the “serious” academics were putting down as impossible and referring it to a “circus” The Australian Museum in Sydney when it began a cloning project in 1999. The project’s intent was to extract the thylacine genes from a 136-year-old pup in ethanol and rebuild the entire genome. The next obvious step would then be to create breeding clones to bring back the mascot of Tasmania’s Coat of Arms—all a mission hoped to be achieved in the next 10 years. How romantic a concept. Enough to receive words of discouragement of the highest order:
Jeremy Austin, of the University of Queensland likened the task of reconstructing a thylacine’s genome to trying to rebuild, in order, a complete set of encyclopeadias that had been torn into little pieces and had had some of pages burnt or singed.
Poor Professor Archer won the Australian Sceptic of the Year award in 1998 and even won a Sceptics Bent Spoon Award, for “the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle”. Did that stop him? Hell no! His reply seems as rational as believing humans would one day take photos of Martian rocks. Professor Archer refuted:
That might be what he anticipated but we found great big chunks, torn into big chunks. The challenge is enormous but it is not what he is describing.[..] Scientists tend to assume that what hasn’t happened, can’t happen.
Bad and good news. The bad news in February 2005 was that this fantastical project was going to be cancelled due to the genes being too degraded. The good news is that three months later it was restarted with backup from interested universities and a research institute! Now, three years after that, it seems the dream is still alive in motivation at least by others not as defeatist as grumpy Jeremy Austin. Scientists still see the prospects of creating a thylacine clone as an unlikely possibility or virtually impossible or like Marilyn Renfree, a professor of zoology puts it:
[It's] probably an impossible dream. Our study was aimed at developing methods for examining the function and evolution of genes from extinct mammals. [...] We made one tiny step forward by looking at the function of one gene, but you never know what will be possible someday?
Might I note that Neil Armstrong also said “one small step for man” when stepping on the moon for the first time? At least NOW the “serious” academics are only saying “unlikely”, “virtually impossible” and “never know what will be possible”. I think the Australian Skeptics guys behind The Bent Spoon Awards need to rename their continuously unclaimed awards to something better. Obviously they’ve never watched The Matrix…
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
My lifetime thus far has taught me one thing: Never bind man with things he can not do, it’ll only make him eventually do them. Failing only makes him try harder.
You hear that Professor Archer?! You still have a year left my man! If that’s not enough then take another 10 YEARS damnit! There is no spoon! THERE IS NO SPOOOOOON!
–I think I just saw a thick-jawed dude jump past my apartment window in a tight royal blue spandex–
[Yes, this degraded into a Tick reference...]
