Posted for Heidi Ledford
A 16-year-old frozen mouse carcass made headlines yesterday when scientists announced the rodent was the first frozen animal to be cloned. In a paper published online by PNAS, Teruhiko Wakayama of RIKEN in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues report that they were able to produce healthy clones from the rodent’s frozen brain cells.
Frozen cells have been cloned before but those cells were specially treated with chemicals that helped protect them from the damaging effects of freezing. Wakayama’s paper is the first to successfully clone a frozen animal that was, from what I can tell, pretty much just placed in a paper box and plunked straight into a –20ºC freezer in the early 1990’s.
The authors are excited about the possibility of using the technology to resurrect the woolly mammoth from carcasses frozen in Arctic tundra, but acknowledge the possible technological leap between using a 16-year-old and a 40,000-year-old frozen body. (I won’t pretend to understand the obsession with the woolly mammoth, but have acknowledged that the obsession is very real ever since I learned there is a black market for woolly mammoth parts run, at least in part, by the Russian mafia.)
Wakayama’s technique relies on painstakingly sorting through cells to find those that are still useful for cloning. It’s not clear yet how useful the method will be for animal conservation efforts, but New Scientist spoke to a manager of a zoological biobank who says he’ll be writing to biologists to ask them to freeze bodies of endangered species, just in case.
And what about those frozen people, like famed American baseball pitcher Ted Williams? New Scientist raises the possibility of ‘resurrecting’ them and then dismisses it: “People who sign up to be cryogenically preserved usually hope to be resuscitated rather than cloned.”
The Daily Mail started out yesterday with the headline “Frankenstein science fears as scientists clone animal killed and frozen 16 years ago”, but has since removed most Frankensteinian traces from its story. It has a decidedly more dystopian take than New Scientist: “It could also lead to a macabre new industry—where people leave behind ‘relics’ of their bodies in freezers in the hope that they could one day be cloned.” I suppose, but it seems to me the cryonics business was well on the road to macabre before this study came out.
Picture top: its adorable clone / courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS
Picture lower:creepy frozen mouse / courtesy of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS