Should we clone extinct or endagered animals and plants

St Aidan’s Anglican Girl’s School assignment

Should we clone extinct or endagered animals and plants

First thing students need to do is look at the techniques involved in cloning plants and animals.  Plants are easy. Every time you take a cutting from a plant or graft a cutting you are creating a clone.  We have been doing this for hundreds of years and nature does without our help, for example when trees send up suckers.

Cloning animals is a different story and there are plenty of complicated ethical considerations to make you think. Are there any ethical considerations for plants?  If so, how do they differ, if at all, from animals?

For this blog, I will concentrate on the animal stuff.  Note: we have yet to clone an extinct animal, but we have cloned endangered ones.  More details below.

Making a clone

Here are some links to help you get your head around how animal cloning is done:

Interactive: Clone a Tassie Tiger

The written version from Human Genome Project

The ethical stuff

You will have realised that cloning is a very inefficient process.  That is the success rate is poor, and it is expensive to do, but is that justification for not trying?  And if you don’t try how do you advance the technology?

Another issue is that many of the animals that are born are malformed or weakened in some way.

See this New Scientist article about the first success at cloning an extinct species – sort of

Some issues with attempting to clone extinct species

First you need to find intact DNA. Fragments of the genome are no good unless you have enough fragments to piece together the entire genome, and even then it is a task that today’s technology has yet to master as the attempt to clone the Tasmanian Tiger has shown.

Second, you long dead and now extinct animal must have died somewhere to preserve that DNA – eg Siberian permafrost or tinder dry caves.  Most DNA, however, does not survive the elements.  Even in ideal conditions, a million years is usually the longest DNA will remain intact for, so forget trying to recreate T-Rex

Third you need a close living relative that can be the surrogate mother.  It ain’t going to work trying to resurrect a Tasmanian Tiger using a dog – one is a marsupial remember.  A Tassie Devil might work, though.  

OK so you have cloned your extinct species.  What are you going to do with it?  What will its future be?

Check this scenario out to get you thinking

And just for interest. How to clone a mammoth

Not dead yet

Cloning an endangered animal is somewhat easier because you have living and intact DNA to work with, so success is more likely.  But you still have issues with a lack of genetic diversity and the same ethical issues associated with cloning anything.

The Guar was the first endangered animal cloned – born in 2001 – and there have been a few more since.  See this link nscloningnotes for some notes

Why not an animal bank?

We have created numerous seed banks to store the seeds of all sorts of environmentally and agriculturally important plants.  Why not do the same for animals. That is store tissue samples from endangered animals. This will at least allow you to ensure genetic diversity down the track.  That is, you would make sure the samples you froze were from a wide range of genetically distinct individuals so that if you ever had to using cloning to bring back or save a species from extinction you would have a genetically diverse individuals to eventually breed from.  In-breeding is thing to avoid.  Think what happens if humans start in-breeding….perish the thought.

See this New Scientist article about success with cloning mice from frozen brain tissue

Let ‘em go extinct. 

There is an interesting debate about how much effort and money one should put into saving nearly extinct animals.  To attempt to do this can cost millions of dollars and if you are lucky enough to be successful you have a handful of individuals that lack genetic diversity and often without sufficient habitat to put them in.  Would we do better to put our scarce money and resources into protecting vulnerable species – ie those that might become endangered or go extinct if we don’t start doing something now?  This way you could use the money and people power to save many species instead of just one.

See following articles

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/02/2206113.htm

and a media release I wrote a while ago

Right or wrong

Cost of cloning is too great to justify?  Or, what is the cost of extinction and do we have a duty to try and save these animals?

Is the knowledge gained by improving the cloning process worth the effort?  What knowledge could be gained?

What would be the future of extinct animal brought back to life through cloning?

Should we distinguish between cloning an extinct species and an endangered one? That is should one have priority over the other or do we attempt to do both – or neither?  Why?

When, if ever, would we be justified to attempt to clone and extinct species?  What about an endangered one?  That is what are the criteria that says this animal should be cloned and that one shouldn’t be?

Should we forget about this altogether and spend money on just saving the vulnerable species?

Is an animal tissue bank a good idea, bearing in mind the cost of setting one up and then maintaining it?

Is cloning going to help the conservation effort – since that is the main purpose for attempting this?

What are your thoughts regarding the above questions.  Time to start the discussion.  Should we get a discussion going I will see if I can get experts to contribute as well.

Jason Major

GNTIS