Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [17]
“I think it would be fed with droppers,” Don added.
Then there was the problem of the young tiger's health. Clones were difficult to bring to term and not always healthy. Dolly (one of twentyseven implantations that survived) had actually been rather sickly. It was suggested she suffered from premature aging. The cloned guar had died two days after its birth from dysentery. And the second cloned banteng suffered from large-offspring syndrome, weighing eighty pounds at birth (twice the normal size), and was euthanized. Don thought some of the kinks from these early cloning attempts would be worked out by the time the thylacine was cloned. “That was the first experiment,” he said of Dolly. “Fifteen years down the track, I imagine there will be a success rate of at least one in two. It will become much more routine.” Still, it was possible things wouldn't work right immediately. What they were doing was much more difficult than borrowing DNA from a living animal like a sheep. They were making the tiger's DNA, reconstructing it from tiny fragments in their lab.
Ultimately, their goal was to create a living animal that was genetically close enough to have interbred with a thylacine from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. But their creation would be synthetic, its DNA a best-guess reconstruction. Like a cubic zirconia, the thylacine clone would not be quite the real thing. For example, it might be born missing its stripes. If they chose to or needed to, however, they could manipulate the DNA, tweak it, make little changes to fix any problems.
That was a sobering thought—and one that went way beyond natural selection. It began to remind us of some of Alexis's paintings. In one piece called The Farm, which imagined the future of biotechnology, he had painted brick-shaped watermelon, a cow with a rectangular body and eight udders, and a chicken with six wings. Would a future thylacine ever be “fixed” along those lines? It had already been suggested that the tiger clones be made bigger and fiercer so that they could be released on the Australian mainland and compete with dingoes. Would cloning scientists create a super-thylacine, immune to disease and with bulletproof skin? What about making them smaller and more docile? Then they could be sold in a late-twenty-first-century pet shop. They could probably even be made to glow in the dark.
We suspected Don would have been horrified if he could have heard our stream-of-consciousness, horror-movie-driven thoughts. His goals were conservation, preservation, and of course knowledge. Still, he recognized the cloning project had a metaphysical dimension.
Even if his team got the DNA perfectly right (no tweaking, no manipulation, a perfect twin), the question remained: Is DNA what truly makes a species or an individual animal?
“It depends on what a thylacine is, doesn't it?” Don said. “Is the essence of that animal its genetic component, or does it include its behavior and so forth?” Maybe thylacines were passing down information from generation to generation, along with their genes, over tens of thousands of years. Maybe hunting techniques and vocalizations were learned, not innate. Assuming the thylacine clone had a place to live, how would it know what to do?
And what about a place to live? The obvious choice would be to release the tiger clones into protected habitat in Tasmania. David Brower, the longtime director of the Sierra Club, once said, “Wild species are 2 percent flesh and bone and 98 percent place.” Outside its true habitat, the thylacine clone would be nothing but a glorified lab rat. Don agreed. “We want to use this project to reinforce the importance of conserving habitat in Australia. Whatever we'll spend in the lab, we'll need to spend ten times that on habitat protection. We've spoken to the parks and wildlife people in Tasmania, who inform us that there is a lot of suitable habitat down there.”
There was just one small problem with that idea. At present, Tasmania does not permit the use of genetically modified crops, let alone the release of genetically