Celia Does A Lazarus

CELIA DOES A LAZARUS

2003 was the year in which an event happened which was unprecedented in the Earth's history. This even only lasted for a few minutes, but nevertheless it heralded the start of a whole new chapter in the ongoing story of life on Earth. It may be only a slight exaggeration to describe this event as a miracle; only, it was not divine intervention that caused this event but rather science.

This story centres around what was once an extremely rare subspecies of mountain goat known as the Pyrenean ibex or bucardo. It was so rare, in fact, as to be classified as EW (which stands for 'Extinct in the wild') by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (ICUN) The few remaining members of this subspecies lived in a national park in northern Spain. Or, rather, they did until January 2000, for it was then that a thirteen-year-old female bucardo named Celia was killed by a falling tree. Tragically, Celia was the last survivor of her species. The ICUN therefore changed the status of the bucardo from EW to EX, as in extinct.

Extinct, as in dead as the Dodo. Gone forever. Extinction is one of those absolutes. Once a species is extinct, there is no coming back.

(An ibex, similar to the extinct species. Image from wikimedia commons)

But not, it turns out, in the case of this subspecies of mountain goat. A tiny piece of Celia had been preserved prior to her untimely demise. This came about because one Dr. Jose Folch, who was a biologist working for the Aragon regional government, had taken the step of preserving skin samples taken from Celia's ear and preserving them in liquid nitrogen. This meant that, while the subspecies itself might have vanished from the earth, its genetic line was still present, safely stored in that liquid hydrogen.

The preservation had taken place in 1999. In 2003, Dr Folch and his team removed the nucleus from one of Celia's preserved ear cells and, using a technique similar to that which resulted in the cloned sheep Dolly (nuclear transfer cloning), transferred it into the egg cell of a domestic goat. That genetically-altered egg was then transferred into a surrogate mother goat, via a process the team called 'interspecies nuclear transfer cloning'.

Five months later, the surrogate mother gave birth to a live Pyrenean ibex. In all of earth's history prior to this event, once an animal was extinct it was gone forever. Ammonites, trilobites, tyrannosaurs, mammoths, Neanderthals, Tasmanian wolves...there is a huge list of animals that once dwelled on this planet but which are no longer to be seen. Some of them have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years longer than humankind has existed.

But not the Pyrenean ibex aka bucardo. It was extinct for just over two years before it was brought back from this once ultimate, absolute, and final end.

Sadly, this was not exactly a permanent reversal of fortunes, for the baby ibex only lived for a few minutes before succumbing to a lung condition. Nevertheless, those few minutes of life marked an unprecedented event in the history of life on Earth: The resurrection of an extinct animal.

REFERENCES

"Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves" by George Church and Ed Regis.