Gadgetory

pretty nice mr. green DS is a clone cat that carry a game that is called green fluorescent protein this gene integrating his genome in his chromatin in his chromosome in his cells and expressed a fluorescence that is great.i a senior scientist at the el Doble Research Center for endangered species and I wore basically in interspecies cloning one of the century's greatest scientific achievements was unveiled before the eyes of a stunt world her name was Dolly the sheep each human life is unique born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science I believe we must respect this profound gift and resist the temptation to replicate ourselves cloning is probably still a controversial technology if you survey Americans you'll still get a huge percentage of people that say cloning is morally wrong that it opens up Pandora's box that we're going to clone humans next sort of all these hypothetical sci-fi scenarios and that hasn't changed but I think as cloning has sort of fallen off of front pages scientists have sort of had some space to quietly go about their work without stirring up controversy at every turn the Audubon Center for research of endangered species or acres as many people call it for short is a facility in New Orleans that is devoted to using advanced reproductive technology to help endangered species breed and survive and thrive we work in assisted reproductive technologies a specialist in cats and in Wolcott cloning provides a way to help endangered species reproduce so if their numbers are dwindling and they're not reproducing well in captivity you could maybe take a skin sample from an endangered animal and use it to create an identical twin a lab that focuses exclusively on the cloning of endangered or threatened species is pretty rare there are not a lot of scientists that are focusing full-time on that application of cloning so cloning from Dolly through the kind of cloning that Akers is doing is generally done for a procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer and a somatic cell is basically any cell in an animal's body that's not a sperm cell or an egg cell so it could be a skin cell a muscle cell something from the body and so if scientists want to clone say a wild cat they'll take a skin sample from that cat and they confuse that skin cell with an egg can you see Vivian is here outside when that happens the DNA from the Wildcat from that skin cell enters the egg and as the egg turns into an embryo as it grows and divides it has the DNA that came from that skin cell this sort of cloned embryo can then be implanted in a surrogate mother say an average house cat that will carry the embryo to term if all goes well and eventually give birth to this cloned wild cat kitten a lot of what they're learning about cat reproduction and cat cloning could be applied to you know one hosts anything from cheetahs to lions tigers any of those endangered cat species the other development that I think is really positive and really exciting is the creation of these frozen zoos frozen zoos allow scientists to store cells and DNA from animals for hundreds of years and so if a certain genetic lineage dies out we have that cell we have that DNA and scientists a hundred years from now could potentially clone it back into existence one of the criticisms you hear a lot is that cloning is this high-tech sexy spectacle and some scientists think that it actually distracts from these other sort of more basic efforts and the big problem right now is a lot of these animals have their habitats being destroyed their habitats are disappearing so until we can make sure that there's a safe place to release these animals where they won't just be hunted into extinction again it doesn't make much sense to bring a lot of animals back animals vegetation human beings we live together and human beings are covering this pace of the animals and we are destroying them in some way because we are destroying the environment we are destroying the animals indirectly I believe that we need to preserve the animals are part of this this planet and a part of our life and we want the children and the future generations been able to enjoy what what we enjoy