So You’re Extinct? Scientists Have Gleam in Eye
by Gina Kolata
Until recently, the arrow of natural selection seemed to go only one way. A species could form, then it could flourish, then it could go extinct. And once it was extinct, it could not come back.
Now, though, some scientists say they see a new path.
“Maybe we can no longer delay death, but we can reverse it,” said George Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist.
For now, only one extinct subspecies has been brought back, and the baby animal that was born lived just minutes in 2003. It was a Pyrenean ibex, a large goatlike creature that prowled the cliffs in the Pyrenees between Spain and France until the last one died in 1999. The method used was cloning — using frozen cells of the last of the animals to try to create a new one, much like Dolly the sheep was cloned from a frozen udder cell of a sheep that had died years before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/science/earth/research-to-bring-back-extinct-frog-points-to-new-path-and-quandaries.html?pagewanted=all
