"Lazarus Project" Clones Extinct Frog 154
cylonlover writes "Australian scientists have successfully revived and reactivated the genome of an extinct frog. The 'Lazarus Project' team implanted cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept in a conventional deep freezer for 40 years into donor eggs from a distantly-related frog. Some of the eggs spontaneously began to divide and grow to early embryo stage with tests confirming the dividing cells contained genetic material from the extinct frog. The extinct frog in question is the Rheobatrachus silus, one of only two species of gastric-brooding frogs, or Platypus frogs, native to Queensland, Australia. Both species became extinct in the mid-1980s and were unique amongst frog species for the way in which they incubated their offspring."
Re:Similar story posted on Friday (Score:4, Funny)
To qoute the great Ian Malcolm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reverse Jurassic Park? (Score:5, Funny)
I am sure it will croak soon. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:LAZARUS?! Really?! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, I'm still protesting the names of the week - I mean, Tyr, Odin, Thor, Frida - stop forcing your Paganism on me - every. single. week.
This would turn Intelligent Design into a theory (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand: WhatCouldPossiblyGoHilarious.
Suppose over the next hundred years, humans were to start doing this, and some of the resulting speciments got into wild. Then we had a very serious catastrophe (nuclear war, asteroid strike, etc) resulting in 1) we stopped doing it 2) (nearly) all the cultural records were lost, so there are no documents explaining what FooLab did in 2041.
Fast forward six millennia, to the year 8013. Scientists would have rediscovered evolution, but unlike today's situation, some of the evidence wouldn't quite add up right. They would see, from looking at DNA evidence, that something very interesting happened in a few thousand years ago. Someone would get an idea, and they would be able to formulate tests to falsify or confirm a brand new theory, called Intelligent Design, and they'd confirm it. Actually, they would probably call it something less stupid, but it really would be an actual theory, in every sense of the word.
Then, miraculously, in 8016, someone finds a cache of ancient documents. It looks like some storage device the year 2016 survived, and they're able to pull some internet discussion threads off it. They see people talking about something called "Intelligent Design" and something else about the world being six thousand years old. Since it's an incomplete document cache, they have no idea where the 2013 "Intelligent Design" came from, that it was made up, rather than being derived from evidence or related to science somehow. The 8016ers have no idea where the 2013 idea of a 6000 year old world came from, they just know that people sometimes mentioned it, usually mockingly.
You're in 8016 and you learn this. 6000 years ago, people were talking about some things that you know to be true, in a limited form. (Most of life isn't only 6000 years old, but some of it is. Presumably the 2016 discussions, for which you have incomplete records, were about similarly limited samples.) What do you think?
You think "oh shit, people have gone through this before, and something horrible keeps happening every 6000 years," and you start building bomb shelters. You also start looking at the DNA evidence for an echo, for a 12000 year old genetic node, although you don't find it. But there are plenty of ways to come up with good conspiracy theories for why it's not there. Maybe the 2013 people realized that the 4000-BC-genetically-engineered creatures were responsible for the 4000 BC nuclear war, and hunted them (nearly) to extinction. You need to start exterminating the 21st century abominations now .. or wait, is that exactly what went wrong in prior cycles, and what causes the bigger catostrophe? OMG by head hurts. What are we going to do? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO!!?!?!!
Re:LAZARUS?! Really?! (Score:5, Funny)
[I]f I was at a dinner party with any of them and the subject of the name came up I would absolutely point out how ridiculous and annoying and even passively-condoning-of-evil it was.
I bet you're awesome at dinner parties.