Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [14]
As we watched the flying foxes, we began to wonder, What is life anyway? We remembered a scene from the 1931 movie Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein cranks open the ceiling above his lab, revealing a thunderstorm. As electric current surges through a V-shaped Tesla coil, the electricity reanimates slabs of graveyard flesh that Dr. Frankenstein's stitched together, and he screams, “IT'S ALIVE. IT'S ALI-I-IVE!”
That was cinematic science fiction. Dead humans can't be brought back to life—at least not yet. What the Australian Museum's scientists were proposing was that species could be. The implication? Extinction may not be as final as it sounds.
On the morning of our appointment, Alexis accompanied us to the Australian Museum—Dorothy was spending the A.M. buying souvenirs— and we were ushered into the museum's Evolutionary Biology Unit. If we had imagined it would be outfitted like a mad scientist's lab, nothing could have been further from reality. It was a long room with cubicles, paper-piled desks, computer terminals, a coffeepot, and a small conference table. The unit's lead scientist, Don Colgan, was also distinctly un-Frankensteinian. His hair was not electroshocked but smooth, brown, and neatly parted. He didn't rant. In fact, at times, he was such a low talker, it was difficult to hear him.
Don introduced us to his colleague Karen Firestone, an expert on ancient DNA and marsupial carnivores. We all sat down at the conference table, and they offered us cups of tea.
We had looked up Don's curriculum vitae on the Internet. Typically, geneticists working at natural history museums were primarily concerned with taxa. How are species related? How did they evolve? When did one species branch off to form another? Much of Don's own work had to do with invertebrates—aquatic snails, spiders, shellfish—and how they fit into the tree of life. Ultimately, the work was historical: he used genetics to explain how species became the way they are. How had he gotten involved with this radically futuristic project?
It all started, he said, with another work of science fiction, Jurassic Park. In the book and subsequent movie, dinosaurs were brought back to life, using ancient dinosaur DNA extracted from amber fossils. After reading the book and seeing the movie, people started wondering if the Tasmanian tiger could be brought back in the same way, using DNA extracted from specimens at the Australian Museum. Don said no. Not possible. The question kept coming up and he kept saying no, really, it can't be done. In fact, it got to the point that he felt the need to write a detailed letter to his museum's director, the well-known paleontologist Mike Archer, explaining why cloning a tiger wouldn't work.
“The director took that as unequivocal support for the idea,” Don said. “Since then it's generated its own momentum. The animal is in the national psyche.”
Karen, an American in her thirties, had been hired specifically for the tiger project. “Before, I was working with dried skins to look at the population and conservation genetics of living carnivorous marsupials,” she said. “It just seemed like a natural progression to work on a bigger, deader animal.”
The cloning project was premised on the notion that the Australian Museum had this wonderfully intact antique specimen of a tiger pup preserved whole. The plan was that they would extract DNA strands from the pup's soft tissue—its heart, its liver—and reassemble those strands to re-create the tiger's entire genome. Once the tiger's DNA had been copied, catalogued, and sequenced,