Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. It might not surprise
Speaker 1: you to hear that many wild animal populations are struggling.
Speaker 1: At this point. Humans and the livestock that we grow
Speaker 1: for food account for of mammal biomass on Earth. We
Speaker 1: take up a lot of space with our bodies, livestock,
Speaker 1: and infrastructure, and that's driving wild animals into extinction. But
Speaker 1: we twenty one century humans are smart, right. Can't we
Speaker 1: figure out a way to help these animals survive or
Speaker 1: at least save some of their genetic material until such
Speaker 1: a time when we can help make, for example, new
Speaker 1: Sumatran tigers, of which there are only about four hundred
Speaker 1: alive today in the wild. The concept of creating a
Speaker 1: repository for the genetic material of endangered species has been
Speaker 1: around for a while. Projects like the Frozen Zoo at
Speaker 1: the San Diego Zoo and the Frozen Arc in the
Speaker 1: UK have been cryogenically storing genetic material from captive mammals,
Speaker 1: that is, raising it in liquid nitrogen at temperatures around
Speaker 1: negative three degrees fahrenheit that's negative one celsius. Samples from
Speaker 1: everything from the Pacific pocket mouse to the clouded leopard
Speaker 1: have been stored since the nighties, and cloning endangered species
Speaker 1: has proven possible. In the early two thousands, scientists successfully
Speaker 1: cloned a couple of them, an African wildcat and an
Speaker 1: Asian ox. But we spoke with Franklin West, an assistant
Speaker 1: professor in the Regenerative Bioscience Center at the University of Georgia.
Speaker 1: He said, the problem with cloning is it's highly inefficient.
Speaker 1: The process is tricky even with animals that are well
Speaker 1: understood and described, like housecats, dogs, horses, and cows. So
Speaker 1: when you start talking about cloning endangered animal species, it
Speaker 1: gets tough because we just don't have enough information about
Speaker 1: the animal. Cloning also requires eggs from the animal you're
Speaker 1: trying to clone, but obtaining gammeats, that is, sperm and
Speaker 1: eggs from a live animal can be extremely difficult, especially
Speaker 1: an endangered one. Sperm can be taken from a zoo
Speaker 1: animal that has reads sly died, but eggs present the
Speaker 1: real challenge, especially because as in human IVF treatments, the
Speaker 1: best results often come from having lots of eggs available.
Speaker 1: West said, most of the time it's too risky to
Speaker 1: collect eggs because you need to superovulate the animal, and
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a surgical procedure involved. With most endangered species,
Speaker 1: the best you can get is a skin biopsy. But
Speaker 1: skin is never going to turn into a new tiger,
Speaker 1: so what do you do with that. It's almost of
Speaker 1: limited value without some sort of functionalization of it, which
Speaker 1: is why West and his colleagues have developed the technology
Speaker 1: to turn almost any cell in the body there are
Speaker 1: some exceptions, but very few, into a pluripotent stem cell,
Speaker 1: which is a cell that can turn into any other
Speaker 1: type of cell in the body. West and his colleagues
Speaker 1: have had success in turning a skin cell into a
Speaker 1: stem cell and turning those stem cells into sperm. West
Speaker 1: says they could potentially even turn a stem cell into
Speaker 1: an egg as well, which would get around to the
Speaker 1: problem with cloning not having an egg source. If they
Speaker 1: can use this assisted reproductive technology to make both of
Speaker 1: these male and female gammeats, they could use them together
Speaker 1: to make a live offspring. The team has begun by
Speaker 1: banking skin cells from a Sumatran tiger and a clouded
Speaker 1: leopard at Zoo Atlanta. West explained we could have done
Speaker 1: cows or horses but we chose cats for a number
Speaker 1: of reasons. The fact that we know a lot about
Speaker 1: domestic housecat reproductive physiology makes it reasonable to do larger
Speaker 1: cats like clouded leopards. Ultimately, what I'd like to do
Speaker 1: is use domesticated cats as recipient animals. Theoretically, you could
Speaker 1: transfer clouded leopard embryo into a housecat. In addition to
Speaker 1: creating new animals, this technology might be useful in helping
Speaker 1: protect vulnerable populations of animals from disease. For instance, the
Speaker 1: lions in the Serengetti National Park have become vulnerable to
Speaker 1: canine distemper, a disease related to measles and humans, which
Speaker 1: is most commonly found in domesticated dogs. This technology could
Speaker 1: potentially be used to generate distemper resistant lions. Because it's
Speaker 1: almost impossible to vaccinate in the injured animals in mass
Speaker 1: this might be an option to breed resistant animals that
Speaker 1: could introduce resistance into natural populations. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other futuristic topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
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