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Science

Scientists Manage Interspecies Birthing 204

Posted by Hemos from the now-i-can-have-my-mammoths dept.
Kinthelt writes "For the first time, an animal of one species gave birth to another species. Not only that, but they also used a frozen embryo. " The species was an American short-haired cat birthing an African wildcat. Similar size and weight ranges which helped the birth go successfully. I've heard that this is the method they are considering using for mammoth birthing - using an African or Indian female elephant to implant a woolly mammoth embryo. It's going to be a lot harder to create that embryo though, unlike the wildcat which was created naturally.
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Scientists Manage Interspecies Birthing More

Scientists Manage Interspecies Birthing

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  • Simple solution, we only bread female mammoths.

    From the not-seen-jurasic-park department.

  • Inter-species breeding is not what is being talked about here. The embryo in this case is pure wildcat, it was just implanted and gestated inside a domestic cat... and that's what is far-fetched.
    /\ X | O M
  • I'm not sure this is the first time we've had an interspecies birth; I seem to recall a mare giving birth to a live zebra....


    The Kulturwehrmacht [onelist.com]
  • Funny.
  • Population control. We have chosen to adopt moral standards for our living. Now we are overpopulated. It's our problem now, since we took control over that part from nature.

    I'm not saying that it's a good thing, either.. but.. someday we'll see the consequences of it.

  • I remember seeing a documentary a few years ago about the technical problems arising from creating a "Jurassic Park", and the main problem that would be present is giving them enough food and space to actually survive. IIRC, for the dinosaurs on the island in JP, the amount of food you would need each day would feed the population of NY for a week, or something like that.
  • On Toronto Island (the island off downtown Toronto, Ont, Canada) there is a petting zoo, which has a half-zebra, half-horse. Brown and black stripes.
  • Firstly, I am proud and privileged to be Kansas born and bred, and that we have finally found the courage to weed these Darwinian bullshit from poluting our young minds.

    God, in his infinite wisdom has already granted us with enough amusements, in the form of the platypus and the wallaby, and have even thoughtfully planted the mammoth to sate our weak and confused minds from reckless and dangerous inquisition into the true state of His domain which we can never fully comprehend. Why, in the unpronouncable name of God do we need to mess with His authority?

    Secondly, Don't you know that it is not only a SIN to mess with GOD's creations, that it is impossible? Christ! Don't you know that since all the living creatures can only be created from God and God alone, and that tampering with this world order can cause the world to disappear in a puff of logic?

    /. needs to go. Don't you all know the mess you are getting into? All these talk is clearly very dangerous. Please understand that I am only trying to save the world from the wrath of God.

    Pentiti!... or be dragged to hell when judgement comes at around Christmas after teatime.
  • Here's a take on this. If this is possible, and it would work between human and primate, what this opens the door to is a no-fuss pregnancy for the working woman. Donate an egg. Donate a sperm. Incubate. Place in primate. Carry to term. Deliver. All the joys of having a child of your own without the fuss of pregnancy. Pretty out there, but the possibility would seem to exist. And you know there has to be a market for it.
  • Wolves, dogs, and coyotes all breed successfully; thus, they are properly considered a single species.
  • I'm going to merge a dog and a cat. This will make the perfect animal. I will sell many of these animals. I will patent my idea and retire a millionare.

  • Doesn't this sort of thing (inter-species breeding, that is) happen all the time in suburban neighborhoods? I mean, dogs..... ....most species of dogs are "mixes" of other species.

    Sorry, not so. The various dog breeds are all members of canis familiarus - all the same species. There's a lot of variation within the species due to dogs being specially bred for one and another purpose, but they are technically a single species. So no, this isn't just like dogs mating.

    Although it *is* kind of similar to what happens when e.,g. a horse mates with a donkey to produce a mule. The mule foal isn't the same species as the dam.

  • The problem with something like a cow giving birth to a tiger is that the cow can not teach the tiger how to be a tiger. Only another tiger can, or possibly something else like a jaguar or a leopard, but not a cow. I suspect even if they did perfect this, it would still only be reasonable to do within species of the same genus.
  • you sing them a chef song
  • Can be attributed to the very large genetic diversity in wolves, as well as inbreeding. There was a documentary about this the other night, and it described most types of dogs today being products of years of inbreeding and breeding with other types of dogs. However, the early forms of this specialized breeding relied on the huge genetic diversity of wolves, though wolves don't look too much different than eachother, carry radically different traits in different parts of the world.
  • You're kidding, right? All the usual domesticated dogs are the same species. Yes, that little yappy thing really is the same species as a German shepherd!

    Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.

  • This is a lot *easier* than it looks (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @12:46PM (#1464885) Journal
    You haven't studied biology. Your fundamental premise is that the pregnant mammal has no immune reaction against the cells of the fetus. You ignore a lot of inconvenient facts to the contrary:
    • Mothers cannot take transplants from their children without risking rejection like everyone else.
    • Reactions against some fetal tissues in utero do occur, and can kill the fetus before or shortly after birth; RH-incompatibility is one of them (RH-negative mother gives birth to an RH-positive child, gets some mixing of blood during birth, develops antibodies to RH-positive blood cells, future RH-positive foetii develop anemia due to immune attack and do not survive).
    There's a biochemical jiu-jitsu that the fetus plays with the host's immune system, otherwise none of us would have lived long enough to be born. As long as two species are similar enough at the molecular level for this well-refined scheme to function correctly, immune rejection of the fetus should not be a show-stopper.
    --
  • The Russian word for corpse sounds exactly like troop.


  • This gives whole new meaning to the phrase, "Gee your mom's a bitch."


    -AP

  • Yes, the dog breeds are all members of the same species, but they also interbreed with coyotes, and produce apparently fertile offspring. Dogs and coyotes may be "subspecies" of each other, as well as wolves; it's all a tangled mess.


    At any rate, the time of divergence between the domesticated cat and the African wildcat is less than ten thousand years ago: much less time than the separation time for the dog and coyote, I suspect. I wouldn't be suprised if they could interbreed and produce fertile offspring in the wild. The main difference between the two species (cats and african wildcats) is that the latter have larger brains. The part that's missing in the housecat, BTW, is the part that in the wildcat is dedicated to color vision. Housecats switched from being diurnal to nocturnal upon domestication, and don't have color vision as a result.


  • The wildcat, along with a few other species, is actually one of the presumed ancestors to the modern domestic feline. And other inter-species breeding successes are common, though often produce genetic mutations.

    For example, mules are horses bred with donkeys. They however are sterile and cannot reproduce on their own.

    Also, Tiger Haven [tigerhaven.org] has a liger, a lion bred with a tiger. Like a mule, it is also a mutation and not a survivable species on it's own.. But having one species give birth to another or a hybrid is not that far fetched.. It was just a matter of somebody doing it.

  • Chimpanzees have been observed to systematically wipe out compteting tribes, a practice that in humans would be regarded as genocide. Does that make genocide right? No.

    But you do understand that you have to say that, right? Even if tendency toward genocide is genetically coded into out being. After all, one can hardly be prosecuted for behaviour that is coded directly into one's genes? So you decree all humans as being above that so you then have a platform to judge, prosecute and incarcerate from? No need to reply. Just think about this for a moment.

  • Q. What's the difference between God and a genetic engineer? A. God doesn't play genetic engineer.
  • I had read this earlier on MSNBC. It gives a whole meaning to efficiency...first the cub nurses off the mother...then it becomes a full-grown lioness...then it eats mother...is that an Eat-A-Pus complex???
  • That is if it where a dog, not a cat. But seriously folks, remember when people used to say "Extinction is forever"?

  • I've heard that this is the method they are considering using for mammoth birthing - using an African or Indian female elephant to implant a woolly mammoth embryo.

    A couple weeks back, the London Times ran t his story [sunday-times.co.uk] which reports that so far, all attempts at extracting mammoth DNA from preserved specimens have failed. Furthermore, it's unlikely that a usable sample will ever be obtained, though they haven't given up hope and are continuing their search for more frozen carcasses.

    For now, though, it looks like mammoth cloning has gone... well, the way of the mammoths. ;)


    Regards,

  • Next experiment... (Score:3)

    by 198348726583297634 ( 14535 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @12:23PM (#1464899) Journal
    they'll cross-breed JonKatz with CmdrTaco. the result? Slashdot articles will disappear and sometimes the whole thing will grind to a halt, but nobody minds much anymore except the flamers.

  • I wonder how this particular scheme can be misused? It seems that this could help pave the way for some pretty nasty attempts at genetic engineering and some wonderful new abuses for females of various species.

    I suppose there is the flipside that it contributed to our understanding of life to some degree, but is it worth it?

  • I've got to say (ashamedly) that when I first read this headline I thought it said, "Scientists manage interspecies breeding", but thankfully they have left that to the farmers and sheepherders.
  • This is great, with any luck most endangered species can have their embryos frozen and then can be birthed by more common cousin species. Of course this doesn't really help the white rhino, since I doubt that there are any common cousin species to the rhino.

    Of course now one wonders how long it'll be before the Jurassic Park fans start wondering, "Where is a fly trapped in amber when you need one?".

    Bad Command Or File Name
  • The first thought that entered my head after the intial 'Gee Whiz' was "I wonder if there is another specieces close enough to humans to try this with, or one that could be genetically engineered to use for that purpose. Since ppl seem to be going to great lengths to overcome infertility, they may be able to get past the initial "ewww, a monkey" feelings to try this.

    I think it is wonderful that technology can overcome some infertility, but the cross species troubles with viruses in recent decades makes this a particularly fightening path. Maybe such hosts would merely be used during research and never brought to term, but ethics aside, the bridge this gives micro-organisms from other primates to humans is something i don't think we want to provide. I really wonder how this will be used.
  • To further emphacize how difficult this is, did you notice that EIGHT embryos were inserted and only ONE was carried to term?

    My fiance is a biologist who works on DNA analysis of plants and she could explain this much better than I ever could, but I will try to phrase this in a way for those of us who don't know much biochemistry to understand. The body reacts to foreign objects by getting rid of them. It does not accept them and give them nutrients they need to grow into living creatures. The body has to be tricked into believing that the foreign object belongs there before it will naturally incorporate it. The more different the object is from what should naturally be there, the more the body rejects it. In the case of embryos, the slightest rejection can destroy them outright.

    B. Elgin

  • Re:wow (Score:1)

    by |0|4 ( 121989 )
    "being mother to a chimpanzee" ???

    Personally, I'd have to say 'Hell NO!' to that one. Of course, I'm not sure if I ever want to be mother to _anyone_, regardless of species.

    I am wondering, though - just how much difference is there between a domestic cat and the African wildcat? I read somewhere (IIRC) that the African wildcat is an ancestor of the domestic cat...and there doesn't appear to be much difference between them. Can the two species crossbreed? (If they can, this experiment would be a lot less impressive.) The mother and baby animals, by definition, have to have compatible blood-types (no cow birthing a rhino) and such...
  • Um, dude, I think Nickelodeon beat you to it...

    Meowp!
  • My next door neighbor has a half Chow Chow, half wolf. Very scary animal, completely black. It eats rabbits and squirrels.
  • IIRC, the proper scientific theory is that two creatures must be of the same species in order to produce fertile offspring. Since a mule can't breed, it isn't really a species, is it?
  • And the inbreeding shows in many breeds. For example, dalmations have a very high rate of various birth defects including poor hearing.
  • > Dogs and coyotes may be "subspecies" of each
    > other, as well as wolves; it's all a tangled
    > mess.

    Actually I have heard the argument (and agree with
    it) that There is only Wolves. "Dogs are the
    Same species and do not deserve their own
    designation.

    They are just horribly inbred to the point that
    up to 20% of "Pure Breed" dogs have what would
    otherwise be very rare genetic diseases in
    wild wolves.

    I supose you could call them a "Cultivar"
  • Thats mostly because your not inbreeding them.

    Sexual life thrives on diversety. When mice
    are given the choice of mating with a mouse
    with similar immune system genes to them or
    one with differnt genes...they pick the
    differnt one.

    "Pure Breeds" are just inbred. Its like the old
    wisdom goes "You have sex with your sister, and
    end up with stupid kids with buck teeth who
    only fuck chickens" (I forget where I got that
    quote from)

    If you make a gene pool to small..it stagnates.
    The whole idea of "Purebreds" is to amplify
    certain "desirable" genes, many of which are
    normally recessive.

    Unfortunaly when you do that...you amplify the
    recessive diseases too. The individuals get
    less and less healthy over several generations.
    Adding "new genes" to the pool replentishes their
    pool.
  • I buy that; of course the revival of extinct species seems to push against the mechanism of natural selection. However, another key piece of this evolutionary mechanism is its reliance on random pairings of different sexual organisms and the rare adaptive mutation.

    If we let the gene splicers do their work (perhaps breeding elephants and pigs --be sure to get 'em both nice and drunk first) they can simply create all sorts of "good idea" matches, set them loose, and let natural selection cut out the fat. Not second-guessing evolution, just giving it a good wiggle and a shove.

  • You're right, this isn't far fetched at all. However, this isn't really like the mules and the ligers at all. This is having two animals of the same species (i.e. two wildcats) breed and produce an embryo. The embryo will then be tranfered into an animal of a simular species (i.e. a house cat) and that simular animal bear the young. The young, though born of an animal of a different species, are still wholy one species, and will be able to reproduce. This really isn't a new idea. It has been in the works for a long time, with various veterinairians trying it with different types of animals, but the procedure of tranfering the embryos from one animal to the other was proving very difficult. I, myself, am working as a research assistant for just such a project. In our project, we are attempting to plant the embryo of an alpaca into a llama. It's a fasinateing thing to be a part of. The application of this, at least in the llama/alpaca trade, is fanominal (Yay! I can speel!). Alpaca's are worth about 8 times as much as llamas because of the quality of their wool (You might remember alpaca sweaters?) Both alpacas and llamas can only bear one chia (baby) each year. However, with this new embryo transplant technology, you could essentially have one breeding pair of alpacas, and a whole lot of female llamas, you could continuously take the embyos out of the alpaca and put them into the llamas and have cheap little llamas produceing purebred alpacas. As you can probably see, this will likely come into question sometime in the near future, but until then, people like me will benefit from this knowledge.
  • "...for the working woman. Donate an egg. Donate a sperm. ..."

    Keep in mind that biotechnology has not come the point of enabling a woman to produce sperm.
  • I read your comment and was agreeing with you until I realized that you were referring to the people who *call* tech support, not the people who *work* in tech support. The phenomenon you are describing is caused by the fact that intelligent people don't generally need to call tech support. And when smart people start to pick up the phone, they think back, as I do, and try to remember a single instance where a tech support person actually gave them a useful answer (not counting when your call gets put through to the development staff). Then they hang up and go look for better software.
  • Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

    I have many friends who have shared ultrasound/sonagram pictures of their baby when they were pregnant. Sorta of neat to look at, and not too gross.

    However, I'm not sure how I would react to the offer to see pictures of "the monkey carrying my baby"

    Better yet, how do you answer the question:

    mommy/daddy, where did I come from?
  • Clearly, cloning TRex and turning them loose would be a mistake.

    Why do you say that?

    I think "turning them loose" was the important part of that sentence.
  • Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.

    Yes and no. While they are classified as different species, dogs and wolves are descended from the exact same set of creatures. They are fully interbreedable, and I have met half and quarter wolves. I live less than an hour's drive away from a wolf breeder who breeds arctic wolves, and they were all raised by his old female husky after being bottle fed by him to make them used to humans. According to one camp amongst biologists, all of the Canis genus that is the domestic and wild dogs, plus wolves, should be one species, since they are interbreedable and simply adapted for different environments.

    B. Elgin

  • Re:Darwinism (Score:4)

    by Bluedove ( 93417 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @12:58PM (#1464925) Homepage
    If anything dies off, then perhaps because they were weak and could not survive in todays harsh world. Is it worthwhile to bring them back to life, and would they be able to survive on their own? Or would we have to contain them at zoos and spend a lot of money to keep them going? Is it worth the effort?

    Fully 99% of all the species that have ever existed on earth are extinct. Natural selection is not some kind of judge deciding what has more worth to live than others, it is a random walk through environment-space. In nature, species go extinct because they're not suited to the changing environment (like North America joining up with South America, and all the North American mammals sucessfully competing for food with the now-extinct South American marsupials). It is not a question of being "weak". It is dumb luck (like the case above) that changes the environment, and hence changes the total set of species existing in that environment. We are now at the point where the environment isn't changing us, we are changing the environment in a non-geological time scale. I think it is noble to pursue science that will enable us to save a species from a currently changing environment (possibly caused by us) sometime in the future.

    Regardless of all this sentimentality, all the bother about Mammoths and the ilk is "hot press" - interesting stories that get the public's attention (and funding dollars). The science behind all the fanfare is certainly worth pursuing. It will teach us much about the environment around us, and a hell of a lot about ourselves. It has applications across the board, even including space travel. When the public hears about "lets ressurect a mammoth" or "housecat gives birth to wildcat", some people get all up in arms about "why are we spending money on this?" The real point of these aren't the mammoths or the wildcats, its the science advancing that is allowing us to do this. Other people will think "Maybe now I will be able to have a child, too!", some will think "we can use this to transport animal species to other worlds at lower costs", and still others will think "I should write another sequel to Jurassic Park".

    Sit back a moment, get past the "mammoths in zoos" hype, and think about all the things this advancement could mean.

    In the end, it is contributing to our technological capabilities. Who knows, maybe after all is said and done, perhaps a species we'll wind up saving will be our own.

  • What I *am* saying is that the placental barrier can stop certain foreign agents from crossing the boundary from the embryo, to the mother.

    That much I know for sure. The question to ask is, are the details (what agents, their combinations, molecular structure, ratios and amounts, etc.) species dependent?

    If so (bloody likely), then it highlights the achievements of this science experiment..
  • Wolves and dogs breed very well, and in fact would be considered one species if the traditional definition of species was used. It is my understanding is that there was no such thing as a "dog" before mankind started breeding wolves a few thousand years ago.

    (The traditional definition has been breaking down, though. For example, there is currently an argument about whether the "Red Wolf" is an actual endangered species, or merely the result of wolf/coyote interbreeding.)

  • Re:Reseeding Of Endangered Species? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have heard that a minimum of 30 representatives of a species are needed to produce a viable population. That assumes all 30 are young, healthy, and can succesfully breed, and it also assumes all 30 are from genetically diverse populations.

    Why 30? Well, consider that if you pick any two random humans off the face of the Earth and trace their lineage, you'll find that they are ON AVERAGE, 40th cousins to one another (We're all inbred to some point.) So 30-40 is right around the magic number.

  • Dude, how do you get a pig to have sex with an elephant?

    get them both really drunk?

    Seriously, you should know from that Loverboy song that "...a pig and an elephant's DNA just won't splice!"

  • I was not suggesting that this should be as easy as producing mules or ligers.. That was just an example that it is possible for an animal of one species to produce an offspring that is not (Or not entirely) it's species. However the bigger point is that the wildcat is likely not too genetically different from the modern domestic cat. Probably more different than various breeds of domestic cat, but not by much. Also, I'm not posative on this, not being a breeder or anything, but I believe many modern species were produces by breeding domestic cats with wild cats, further diversifying the domestic cat gene pool.
  • Church Of The Holy Pear - http://members.aol.com/maceona/holy_pear_home_page .html
  • This sort of thing scares me. What scares me even more is the suggestion that we start creating new species to replace old ones, etc. I am not religious, I don't believe there should be any self-imposed limits on knowledge or anything like that, but I hope we are conservative in this arena. Just because we can make something happen doesn't mean we can control it or even predict its ramifications.

    I can think of several examples of humans affecting nature and ending up bringing other species (or themselves) closer to extinction.

    This practice is at least as old as agriculture. Consider what clearing out large patches of forest or prairie does to the local ecosystem. Even shooting predators like wolves and coyotes causes problems and killing snakes causes even more problems (they control the rodent population).

    Until recently (last 100-200 years or so), I guess this has not been a problem (any more than beavers damming a brook) because of scale. One human (or a group) would try something, it would change the local state, and the human(s) would live or die depending on where they stood in the resulting balance.

    Now we have the technology to affect our surroundings more dramatically, and we do enough of that without meaning to (CFCs, the widespread over-use of antibiotics leading to virulent strains of disease, etc.), shouldn't we be laying low? Do we really understand the affects we're having on the ecosystem enough now to start trying to rectify them (whatever they are)?

    The problem with breeding new species (especially species which reproduce quickly like insects, fungi/algae, rodents), as many ./ folks have pointed out, is that they can multiply beyond our ability to control them (the kudzu vine is one example, not of breeding, but of transplanting). By doing so they can upset the balance and wipe out other species, and so on...

    I think this fear has probably influenced countless B movies, but can we afford to play with new species designed by the race that came up the nuclear bomb, N-Sync, and CORBA?

  • Sick! (Score:1)

    by Kypeli ( 35249 )
    I don't know about any of you, but I think this is REALLY sick already! The humans have f**ked with nature already quite a lot, but this is beyond everything already. Jesus...
  • You have the wrong country. Sure Australia has had plenty of animals die off, but the situation is much more apparent in New Zealand which is where the Kiwi actually come from.

    Besides, you keep up with that sort of attitude and eventually you kill off enough of the biosphere that the whole thing collapses and takes us with it.
  • Actually, I don't really see why it would be such a terrible problem to birth a Thylacine [austmus.gov.au]. Once an embryo is created, it could be implanted into a large dog, say a St. Bernard.

    The only issue that I could think of at this moment (and this is no small issue) is that the Thylacine was a marsupial. This means that they would be born early and complete gestation inside an external pouch on the mother. (Ever seen a kangaroo immediately after birth?? They look like uncooked embryos.) How another animal could simulate this is beyond me. Perhaps they could birth it in the Kangaroo..

    Also, there is the question of how much behavior is inate and how much is learned. We know, from other species like the Pandas, that it is very difficult for them to learn what to do (such as mate) from instinct. The pandas that were residing in California until they died recently, had many, many issues with mating. The male actually couldn't figure out where to put it in! After the female successfully gave birth (actually, this happened quite a few times) she didn't know how to care for the child, and ultimately she would sit on it and kill it.

    I think that at one point in time, I had a point.
    Eh.

    --
  • I've heard this a lot lately: if we can interbreed two feline species, then we're not all that far from doing the same for primates. Problem is that that the two species involved had the same number of chromosomes whereas most primates do not.

    But if we do figure out how cross species with different numbers of chromosomes I'll be glad to see my tax dollars support a human-chimp hybrid project.

    I'm aware that there are serious religious and moral objections to crossing humans with any other species, but crossing chimpanzees (or other primates) with humans would yield a treasure trove of information about the origin of our species and the nature of our so-called intelligence.

    For instance:

    • Geneticists would have all sorts of new information about the heritability of certain traits. Seeing which and to which degree (human or chimp) phenotypes get passed along would be fascinating.

    • Psychologists could learn loads about the nature of reason, emotions, creativity, etc if they had a hu-chimp handy. Imagine the fun they'd have poking around the thing's brain.

    • Linguists could learn about the nature of language; perhaps they could train a hu-chimp to communicate abstract ideas, perhaps not. Could it communicate vocally?

    • Breed several dozen hu-chimps and let the sociologists loose.

    • Evolutionary Biologists might get good hints for finding the "missing link".

    • Anthropologists would have something to compare their subjects to besides other humans.

    • Medicine would surely benefit and not necessarily by performing cruel testing on the hu-chimps. How would a hu-chimp react to the common cold? Everyday bacteria? Ageing?

    -- Anton Voyl

    Say, do mammoths have the same number of chromosomes as elephants?

  • The problem with something like a cow giving birth to a tiger is that the cow can not teach the tiger how to be a tiger. Only another tiger can, or possibly something else like a jaguar or a leopard, but not a cow. I suspect even if they did perfect this, it would still only be reasonable to do within species of the same genus.

    Actually, you mean family (I think)? There is no reason an American bison could not teach a cow to be a Cow/bison and vice versa, yet they are not the same genus (I believe). The same is true of horses and antelope. Creatures with different ancestors, but similar behaviors could work if we ever got good enough to do that.
    B. Elgin

  • From the article I read, the embro was produced in vitro, and allowed to grow in an incubator for 3 days before implantation. Not sure I'd call that "natural".

    Sure, using real wildcat sperm and eggs to start the process off is easier than using mammoth DNA and an de-nucleated elephant egg, but I'm not sure I'd call either of the processes "natural".

  • Except for the frozen embryo part which is a new advancement, wasn't this done between 5-10 years ago with a cow giving birth to a goat or something like that? I swear i saw something along those lines in science news[1] years ago.

    I'm no biologist, so there's a good chance i don't know what the hell i'm talking about.

    [1] General science news, not the magazine known as Science News [sciencenews.org].

  • I seem to have faint memories of seeing a horse giving birth to an implanted Zebra of some sort on some nature show some time ago.

  • Watching too many dumb movies? (Score:3)

    by David Gould ( 4938 ) <david@dgould.org> on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @01:43PM (#1464949) Homepage

    Clearly, cloning TRex and turning them loose would be a mistake.

    Why do you say that? Been watching Jurassic Park too many times? Or maybe Godzilla? Species? Mimic? If you watch enough dumb movies, you might get the idea that resurrecting a species like T. Rex through cloning would cause The End Of The World when they (inevitably) get out of control and eat everybody. Sure, there would be a devastating ecological impact, but nothing that would threaten the survival of humanity. If you dropped a couple of full-grown ones in the middle of a city, they would eat a bunch of people and otherwise cause a big commotion for a few days until they were killed, but that's about it. It's not like they'd breed covertly in the countryside, rising up a few years later by the millions to wreak righteous vengeance upon us for all the species we've destroyed.

    It's not even clear that they would cause that much damage to the ecosystem. They're big, tough, and eat a lot, so you'd think they'd screw up the food chain, i.e., displace whoever is currently the top predator, but then maybe they wouldn't even do that well. First of all, the climate is very different from what they were adapted to. Also, the countryside is no longer full of schoolbus-sized, walnut-brained herbivores for them to eat. They'd have a hard time chasing down the much smaller, faster animals that exist now, especially since they'd have to catch so many more of them. I don't know if they'd even be able to survive, so "turning them loose" might be cruel to them, but it wouldn't be dangerous to us. On the other hand, cloning them for scientific purposes would be of great interest, and the amusement park idea actually just might not be too bad either.

    That said, what makes cloning the mammoth any better? Did we drive them to extinction? I thought the climate did that. Either way, what unsuspecting ecosystem were you planning to drop them into? Seems the ecological impact would be just as bad -- maybe worse, since they would probably have a better chance of flourishing and thus doing some damage.

    David Gould
  • We directly and indirectly kill off species (spotted owls, etc.), and favor other species (chickens, cows, ec.). I see no problem in this regard.

    You see no problem? Yea just wait till you have a craving for one of them spotted owl sandwiches burger king used to serve. Now all we have is chicken and beef, its just not the same =(

  • And in today's news... (Score:5)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @01:45PM (#1464952) Journal
    Mexico City (UPI)

    Biologists working in unregulated laboratories south of the border have long been experimenting with techniques and materials forbidden in the United States for ethical or political reasons. Fetal-cell transplants for treatment of Parkinson's disease has been impossible to obtain in the US, but is commonly practiced here. Now forbidden science threatens to overshadow forbidden medicine.

    At a press conference in Mexico City, Dr. Xavier Cojones announced a breakthrough in cross-species gestation. "Other scientists have managed to bring the offspring of one species to term in the womb of another, but my team has successfully fertilized a hybrid of two species and gestated it inside a third. As these species never mate naturally, this is truly unprecedented."

    According to the press release, Cojones and his team have crossed the Common Geek (Bitfiddleus Obsessivus) with a Trial Lawyer (Ambulancus Chaserium) and gestated the resulting embryo in an Education Major (Lowtestscorus Unemployablus). Despite their outward similarity no cross between any of these is known to have occurred; in nature, these species badmouth, snub, or sue each other to death nearly every time they meet.

    The key breakthrough was in the collection and handling of the gametes and embryo. Cojones and his team claim to have achieved heretofore-unseen success in gestation of such crosses. "Our big advance was in thinking to try using an Education Major as the host-mother. The current conditions for their species are very grim, and evolution has primed their systems to be very receptive to any chance to be involved with juveniles," Cojones said. "Given the proper opportunity, embryos take very well and thrive."

    Asked about the gamete donors, Cojones explained "The key is to find good specimens of each species in their natural habitat and at the peak of their natural cycle. While it is often difficult to tell when a Geek is fertile, we found that it was not at all difficult to obtain sperm from them. Under the influence of a Quake and Corona hangover, many of them will leave perfectly good samples the next morning. Linux Installfests are particular good hunting grounds for this sort of thing. Getting ova from the Lawyer was done by offering the chance to be a plaintiff in a class-action suit against private adoption agencies. This urge of lawyers to eat their own does have its scientific uses."

    The last question of the press conference was about future challenges for the team. Cojones replied, "We are going to revisit some of our failures and see if we can't learn something from them. For two years we attempted to cross a Geek with a rat, without success. We finally had to turn to lawyers for ova, because there are some things even a rat won't do."

    Copyright (c) 1999 United Perversion International. All rights reversed.
    --

  • Mules (Score:1)

    by Octal ( 310 )
    This isn't really big news, horses and donkeys have been having mules since who knows when.
  • To be honest, I have no idea why 30. That is just something I heard a long time ago, and could just be some random number someone pulled out of nowhere.. But you do have a good point. I think, however, you would be hard pressed to put 30 diverse specimens of some species in a room and have them succesful. In fact, I bet they would starve to death in a few days. :)
  • Wasn't there a huge rec.martial-arts thread about 5-assed flying chi monkeys and VTOL tigers?

  • and the collies (think lassie) were highly regarded for their long, narrow snout. 'course, when they kept breeding collies with longer and narrower snouts with each other they were inadvertantly breeding dogs with less and less room in their skulls for their brains and eyes. so collies age poorly: they're dumb, and their eyesight deteriorates quickly, so after a few years they just snap viciously at blurry and threatening things that walk near them.
    sad...
  • Outlandish, interspecies dog breeding is not a particularly new concept. For example, the Taco Bell restaurant chain recently bred Cheech Marin and a chihuahua to produce their latest mascot.

    "Drop the chalupa, man .. Dave's not here"
  • This experiment was done by scientists, in a lab. Typically, "natural" means occuring in nature.

    And when viable offspring are produced in nature, it's not inter-species breeding, now is it?

  • dude .. (Score:1)

    by cje ( 33931 )
    Where are my moderator points when I need them? :-)
  • In-breeding/inter-species breeding,

    Are there any similarities between the two? Are there similar defects? Would a product of inter-species breeding be retarded or something similar?
    I wouldnt think so because inbreeding defects are related to a decreased gene pool. But, just wondering.
  • I'll drink to that! Strangely enough, there was just an episode of South Park where they repopulated the "Jakovasaur" which turned out to be a huge mistake!
  • In Jazz's case, scientists grew the embryo in an incubator for five days, then froze it for a week at minus 373 degrees.


    Wow, that's one hell of a cold freezer you have there man. Even after you extracted all the molecular kinetic energy from that embryo, you made it even colder ;)

  • Mendax Veritas dun said:

    Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.

    1) No, it's not an urban legend; wolf-hybrids do exist and in fact there are actually registries for wolf-hybrids. (In most areas, there are special licensing requirements if they're over 50 percent wolf--basically the same requirements that you'd be under if you kept a full-blooded wolf--but yes, they exist.)

    2) Wolves and dogs are the same species.

    I'll repeat that for those of you who didn't get it--

    Wolves and dogs are the same species.

    Yes, I'm serious. :) Dogs and wolves (and dogs and coyotes, and if memory serves dogs and jackals) have long been known to interbreed; however, until fairly recently zoological nomenclature insisted on not only listing all these as different species but also listed "primitive dogs" like dingos as a separate species as well!

    Fortunately, zoological nomenclature (specifically the ICZN) has corrected this, and ALL of these have now been sunk into subspecies of Canis lupus. Most breeds of dogs are now listed as Canis lupus familiaris (some breeds derived from "primitive dogs" like dingos, Australian cattle dogs, etc. are listed as Canis lupus dingo), coyotes have been sunk to Canis lupus latrans, red wolves (which may well be a hybrid of coyotes and wolves) are listed now as Canis lupus rufus, etc.

    ObThread: For that matter, cats have been sunk too. Cats are now listed in newer versions of nomenclatures as Felis sylvestris domestica; African wildcats (from which house kitties are derived) are listed as Felis sylvestris lybica and European wildcats are listed as Felis sylvestris europeensis(?).

    And FWIW, this is also NOT the first time an animal has give birth to an animal of another species. In the 1980's a horse at the Louisville Zoological Gardens gave birth to a Grant's zebra after having had the zebra embryo artificially implanted; this was specifically meant to give a way to breed more zebras, especially rare species. (The zebra who had a horse for a mom, E.Q., is (I believe) still living at the Louisville Zoo, btw. Incidentially, horses and zebras are even more distantly related than horses and donkeys; a semi-striped zebra known as a quagga (which looked a lot like a crossbreed between a donkey and a zebra) existed till humans hunted them to extinction in the 1800s. There is supposedly a captive breeding program in place in South Africa breeding quagga-like zebras to each other in an attempt to bring back quaggas (of a sort); I've also heard this same technique proposed to bring back mammoths.)

  • Re:The FIRST time? (Score:3)

    by Windigo The Feral (N ( 6107 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @10:32PM (#1464967)

    Brumby dun asked:

    t I'd like to know is how close is the domestic cat to the wildcat? Are they more different than the mare/zebra birth?

    Actually, the kitties are closer than horses and zebras are; African wildcats and housecats are so closely related that they can have fertile offspring, and most modern nomenclature systems actually list both African wildcats and housecats as subspecies of Felis sylvestris.

    Horses and zebras are farther apart--a cross between a horse and a zebra would be infertile, as horses are around as removed from zebras as they are from donkeys--and while equine evolution IS dynamic it's still farther than what was done with the kitties. (And yes, if memory serves, E.Q. (the Grant's Zebra who was birthed by the quarter horse) is still around at the Louisville Zoo; I've some friends who work there and I'll have to see if he's still there or not. He beats the kitties by at least ten years; the big deal with the cats was that frozen embryos were successfully used and it's the first time it's been successfully done in felids...big deal, too, because both big and small cats are hurtin' as far as habitat goes, and most wild cats are at the very least threatened species.)

    What happened with the kitties was roughly equivalent to a dog being implanted with wolf puppy embryos and giving birth to a litter of wolf puppies (as opposed to Golden Retriever or Alaskan Malamute puppies). The level of relation is just as close (if not closer) between African wildcats and housecats as it is between Alaskan malamutes and wolves, down to the fact you can have wildcat/housecat crossbreeds that can have kittens, and for all intents and purposes housecats are domesticated, slightly retarded versions of African wildcats (much as dogs are heavily domesticated, retarded wolves).

  • Like something out of the Onion?

    funny you should say that, they had a story one week about a man who was complaining about not being able to breed his cats - no matter what he tried they wouldn't have kittens. I'm sure you can guess the punchline...

    (he was performing the process himself!)

    It was appalling and hilarious. Alas, it doesn't seem to be in their online archives.
  • One conservation and research group that has been doing interspecies birthing for several years now is the Center for Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) [cincyzoo.org] at the Cincinnati Zoo [cincyzoo.org]. When I was a volunteer at that zoo from 1990 to 1992, part of our training included several talks from CREW researchers who told us of an endangered African cattle species known as a bongo, and embryo of which they had successfully implanted in a more common species of cattle. The birth was successful. In addition, CREW also successfully implanted a common American shorthair cat with the embryo of a rarer species (which I cannot specifically recall) resulting in a live birth.
  • This is heavily coloured by placental chauvinism.

    We now know that placental mammals were present in Australia before it was isolated by the breakup of Gondwana ~50 million years ago. Unlike marsupials and monotremes, these placentals did not persist into the present.

    The introduction of various placental mammals into Australia in the last 200 years has been a large factor in the extinction of a number of marsupial species. However, these introductions have also a large factor in a similar number of extinctions of Australian placentals - rodent species whose ancestors managed the sea journey from Asia in the last few million years.

    Neither data point suggests placental "superiority".

    While monotreme diversity is extremely limited, one monotreme, the Short-beaked Echidna, is rather successful - ranging over the entirety of Australia and occupying habitats as diverse as alpine grasslands, desert and tropical rainforests. Few placentals can make such claims.

  • WWF TV ad circa 2037AD (just before the timeval/DoD missile crisis when us ants got our chance, boy did we EVER!)

    [Camera #1 Close to PowerSuitHSapFem]

    'Hello, my name is [DELETED TO PRESERVE THE TIM LINES] [TIM - see LIF, MEANING OF.]

    [Camera #3 Head n' Shoulders shot]

    As you know our world is in trouble and needs our help, every day endangered species are put at risk, trampled underfoot my McBeef's(TM www.UnInGenEous.Inc) on the Amazonian tundra or allowed to roam the toxic Kansas GiaCities.
    Help us renew our heritige. Each day people like you and me donate womb time [belly shot of fem, hand rounds around distended Channel suit] to the important task of renewing our precious gift - this Earth. You can make a donation from as little as three weeks to nine months, just plip your buy button now, there is no catch!' [PAUSE: show stock wildlife shots from previous millennium/ music: Heartstrings9082/buy (TM www.PsychImpulse.com) BuyPlipperTimeout: BuyCurve3847/ www.LiveNKickingDemoGraphics.com RESUME]

    if $BUYER {
    'Thank you for your kind, kind contribution, a sales' case $BUYER:DEMOGRF{DEFAULT: virtual, C: droid, AB: real} 'person will call soon'

    if $BUYER:CHANHOPPER {
    'Your FREE T-shirt - 'I'm carrying the future, complete with a 30 second MovieGraphic printed on the back with the animal of your choice is now being printed and will arrive shortly'
    Spawn{$AGREEMNT_WWF, $BUYER, swshop=ANY], LOPRI}
    } // chanhopper

    }
    else {
    $VIEWER:ADDPARAMS(META MAILINGLIST=TRUE)

    [recent news footage - toxic death and destruction, rotting/broken: environ/animal/plant]

    'Please re-consider, we need your help in re-construcing our fragile home' $VIEWER:NAME '. our future is together' if $VIEWER:MALE {[closeup hormone powered smile(TM(C) www.TargetAudGraphics.com)] 'please...'} else {[cute fluffy rabbit with bandaged paw shot]}
    }

    ' Thank you for taking the time to be with us'
    SPAWN(ADSHIT_NYC, $VIEWER, ACTION=MAILSHOOT, INFIN)

    As you can see, us ants really don't miss you at all...
  • Since a mule can't breed, it isn't really a species, is it?

    No, it isn't. I refer to them as a crossbreed, because I cannot remember the proper scientific name. The funny thing is that the common term used for all sterile crossbreeds is a mule, after the horse - donkey crossbreed.

    B. Elgin

  • I was wondering the same thing. Sure, they may "technically" be different species, but aren't they both in the feline category? They're both cat-like, so, what's the big news? However, if they're posting this, I'm goint to assume that it's actually a big improvement in their technologies.
  • I was thinking genus.. But it may vary.. Our classification system doesn't exactly line up with natures "this is the way things are" so for one family they could all be compatible and for another only within a genus could be.. I was thinking along the line of cats, however.. It is more likely a domestic cat giving birth to an african wildcat than a domestic cat giving birth to a tiger, or a tiger giving birth to a african wildcat.. A lion giving birth to a tiger probably would be possible though.
  • Several hundred thousand years is a long way removed from 65 million years. I'm not so sure we could get a dinosaur even if aliens and frozen eggs right before the extinction. Still, the technology is promising. Maybe one day, wombs will obsolete altogether.
  • I concur with most of my fellow slashdot readers that this technology can be useful for bringing species to greater numbers that may be extinct. Aside from that, I'm more interested in the relationship between the mother and offspring. A domesticated cat raising a breed of wild cats? I think this should be extremely interesting to follow how the domesticated mother can keep up with her new offspring. This is all assuming if they do not take the offspring away from the mother. On one hand I feel that taking her away from the mother may be beneficial because sooner or later those wild instincts will set in and may do things the mother may not like. It is true the mother probally has these instincts, but I feel that they are mostly put in the back because of years and years of domestication.

    But on the other maybe the mother and offspring should not be seperated. I think that it would be a worthy endeavor to observe how she copes with her unusual offspring.
  • Now maybe the folks at Zd will stop mating with other species.

  • Ha! (Score:2)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    We've known about a second species of man for a LONG time - well.. atleast the phone company knows about this species. How else do you explain the awesome stupidity that happens whenever you work tech support? Normal people aren't this stupid, I don't think. I swear, there's a built-in mechanism to route this species' problems directly to your phone. Echelon, eat yer heart out....

  • This is a *lot* harder than it seems (Score:3)

    by sinator ( 7980 ) on Tuesday December 14, 1999 @12:27PM (#1464995)
    Ligers and mules aside, this is a lot harder than it seems. The main problem isn't the actual fertilization, it's how the mother would deal with bearing a child of another species within itself. Presumably the (progesterone? I'm no biochemist) that the embryo secretes to inhibit reactions from the mother would be contained in proportion suited to a native species. It also might explain why crossbreeds are sterile. Once again, I am not a biochemist or geneticist, so I could be wrong.. However, I'd say that managing to pull this off was great, considering that our technology STILL isn't good enough to prevent organ rejections 100% of the time, I'm pretty sure cross-species gestation is probably an order of magnitude more touchy!

    Good job to the doctors who pulled this off. Perhaps the technology that went into this can go into preventing organ rejections?

    Or at the very least, that half-man half-lizard race of supermen I've been desigining in my basement will be ready to help me take over the world. Shit, was I thinking out loud again?
  • It's estimated that 15%-20% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion or stillbirth.

    Actually, you're VERY low on that number.

    The actual statistics that I've heard from a variety of sources is that 75%-90% of all fertilized human eggs never make it to birth. This includes everything from eggs that don't implant in the uterus, to spontaneous rejection by the body (the mother's body isn't exactly open and friendly to an embryo), to DNA that turns out to be unworkable or incompatible.

    So for every person born, 3-9 possible humans died after conception.
    ---
  • A recent show about dogs, on either TLC or Discovery, made the point of saying that all dog breeds, from the chiuhuahua (sp? new breed?) to the Great Dane, to the Timber Wolf, are geneticaly the same. The argument given was that all breeds are descended from wolves, with controlled interbreeding to bring out certain traits (size, hair length and color) while removing others (temper?). The difference is in appearance only.

    The implied parallel to humans is ethnicity, skin, hair and eye color.

    Now, no one but the most radical racist would dare claim that Jews and Blacks and Nordic Blondes are different species, or that mulato children are inter-species hybrids that (oddly) are not sterile.

    Human breeds, dog breeds and cat breeds are genetically equivalent. This being limited to the domestic cat and dog, but...

    As per the dog show, since domesticated dogs are just wolves bred to present specific traits; then how are domestic cats NOT wild cats bred to bring out their particular traits?

    And if they are just that, then, genetically, they are equivalent, and so inter-breedable.

    Now, it's interesting that frozen embryos were used, and that the common house cat might be used as an incubator for some African breed (BREED not species) that's teetering on the brink of extinction. But so what? If they're the same species then take an African kitty, and a gender appropriate ferral domestic (since a house cat would end up dead), play some soft music and just let nature take it's course.

    Sure, size matters, we can't inter-breed an occelot with a siamese, just as we can't breed the aforementioned TacoBell chiuwawa (new breed for sure!) and Marmaduke; but there's room for natural accomodation.

    What's lab got to do with it? (Sorry, listening to Tina :)
  • "Informative"? Man, moderation is either more error-prone, or moderators are more clueless, than I ever thought.

    Entertaining thought: 1 out of 4 moderators; 1 out of 5 Americans. Americans are doing pretty well by comparison. ;-)
    --

  • Unlike the original post said, they did -not- use a frozen embryo, the fertilized embryos were frozen, stored for a week, thawed, -then- implanted. (Done as an additional proof-of-concept)

    It appears that they are still a long way off, from my reading of the article, from bringing back a Wooly Mammoth, or for that matter, a surrogate mothers for a totally different genus. (ex: A lab cow carrying a tiger kub..) But, you can't walk without taking little steps I suppose.

  • None of those three are likely to be practical.

    1) As for randomly changing the genes, first you have to know the genome (unless you want to take on the astronomically time-consuming and expensive task of taking wild shots in the dark, and it'll take thousands of years to learn the genome by then thanks to the time lag introduced by this technique). In order to know the genome, you need live samples to study. Extinct species by definition have no live samples, so you can't study the genome.
    2) Keeping on cloning: that doesn't really solve the problem. So you have a few animals in zoos; if all of the specimens of a given species are in captivity then the species may as well be extinct; it is no longer a part of nature.
    3) Getting more samples: You do, of course, realize that in all the time we've searched for wooly mammoth DNA, we've only ever found one specimen with most of its DNA left.

    In other words, once a species is extinct there's nothing you can do. It is gone. A sobering thought, to be sure, and a good reason to preserve what species we still have.
  • Pairs of chromosomes can swap "sections" at times
    ("Crossing over"). The question then is - can
    wooly-mammoth-compatible chromosomes be harvested
    or "built" from existing (presumably elephant)
    species? If so, this would provide some biodiversity to work with.

    Theoretically, one can get a few different genotypes from the one specimen, IF a technically
    feasible way to pick and choose individual chromosomes is ever worked out (How many pairs of chromosomes do wooly mammoths have, anyway?)

    It is possible to fuse protoplasts (plant cells with the cell walls removed) from different plant species and sometimes get a viable plant as a result...could some form of biological "nuclear fusion" be used to mix chromosomes artificially between animal cells?

    Fun stuff!
  • Mammals have three surviving (in some cases, barely) groups. Placental mammals (you, me, and the horse you rode in on) always beat out marsupial mammals (possums, wallabies, tasmanian devils, and Captain Kangaroo) when these come into competition/contact, as we saw with the Panama landbridge. My guess is that marsupial mammals likewise beat out the monotreme mammals (the two species of echidna plus the platypus are all we have left) when these came in contact.

    See this link [jhu.edu] or this one [inet.co.th] for a terrific discussion of all this. The Encylopædia Britannica [britannica.com] also has a long article. Here's a less technical bit on monotremes [geobop.com] in general plus specific links for the echidnas [geobop.com] and platypus [geobop.com]. Lastly, here's a brief write-up on the sleep of the platypus [txwesleyan.edu].

    Informatively yours, :-)

  • I am embarrassed for scientists everywhere, when one of them makes a statement like this:

    'Scientists are not sure yet how long frozen embryos can be kept, but Dresser said they might be good for hundreds of thousands of years.
    "If this technology had been available during the age of the dinosaurs, we might have dinosaurs today," she said. '

    Now I have a mental image of dinosaurs running around in lab coats, freezing their own embryos to forestall extinction! Or would that have been the little rodent mammals harvesting the saurian embryos? ;-)

    YS
  • The next logical step from here seems to be cloning of extinct species as the article suggests. The only thing it doesn't mention, and that I haven't heard a lot of mention of at all, is the biodiversity issue. A few clones of, say, a wooly mammoth, are going to have the exact same genes as one another. So how do they expect to be able to bring them back? I imagine they could:
    • Randomly change genes: With knowledge of the cloned animals' genome, you could cause minor mutations that could be used in the place of biodiversity. The only problem is mutating it 'just right' - so that it doesn't kill the creature. Not to mention that we don't exactly have that kind of advanced knowledge yet.
    • Just keep cloning: You don't have an ecosystem of cloned animals, you've got a zoo or three that have a clone of the same animal. Whenever you need a new one, you just clone from the original specimen, or clone one of the clones. This doesn't, however, solve the problem of reintroducing them into the ecosystem.
    • Get more samples If you had DNA from enough specimens, you could clone a biologically diverse group. The only problem is that we have trouble getting enough DNA for one specimen....
    Personally, I'd like to see this kind of thing happen. If we can preserve species which are dying off, then perhaps we can bring them back at some future date when (if) we stop tearing their habitats down.

  • Believe me, it was a lot of fun to write too.

    Although it is frustrating; you spend a little time with your tongue in your cheek, and 4 moderators kick you up. Then you spend an hour checking facts to correct someone's posted misconception, and you get no moderator action, and no responses. It looks like the social tendency is for Slashdot to turn into rec.humor.
    --

  • Also, Tiger Haven has a liger, a lion bred with a tiger. Like a mule, it is also a mutation and not a survivable species on it's own.. But having one species give birth to another or a hybrid is not that far fetched.. It was just a matter of somebody doing it.

    Actually, ligers and tigons are not sterile, they just look stupid. Crossbreeds like the mule are NOT mutations at all. The lion and the tiger are as interbreedable as your average native African human and your average native Asian human. Some biologists regard them as different societies within the same species. They have specialized to different environments, physically and socially, but they are basically the same species.

    The article has nothing to do with crossbreeds, however. The important part is that an African wildcat (a very rare animal) was brought to term by a common housecat. This means that very rare animals can be born without risking the mother in a pregnancy if the population is sufficiently threatened.

    There are many possible misuses of this technology, but lets actually focus on the good for a little while first, OK?

    B. Elgin

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