Black-footed ferret in the wild
© Kerry Hargrove, Shutterstock

Have you ever wanted to clone yourself? Maybe you thought, “While I play video games, my clone can do all my chores!” Well, if you are a black-footed ferret, it’s your lucky day. (But, we’re pretty sure black-footed ferrets don’t play video games.)

In December 2020, the weasel world welcomed a cloned black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann. She became the first of any endangered native North American species to be cloned. In a few years, Elizabeth Ann might have siblings. The successful cloning is promising, because it offers hope that cloned animals could help save species from extinction. Extinction occurs when every member of a species of a living thing has died.

In the past, black-footed ferrets lived throughout much of the Great Plains. They depended on hunting prairie dogs for food and lived in the prairie dogs’ underground burrows. Since the late 1800′s, however, ranchers have eliminated prairie dogs from much of the Great Plains because they consider the animals to be pests. The black-footed ferret has become rare as a result of the decline in prairie dogs. Disease and the loss of rangeland to agriculture have also reduced the ferret’s numbers. Scientists once thought black-footed ferrets were extinct.

In 1981, ranchers in Wyoming discovered a population of more than 125 black-footed ferrets. Over the next several years, many of these animals died of a disease called distemper. To keep them from dying out completely, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department captured the remaining animals. Scientists have successfully bred the ferrets in captivity. In 1991, they began releasing captive-bred ferrets into western grasslands that were home to prairie dog populations. The ferrets began reproducing again in the wild.

The black-footed ferret is not the first animal to be cloned. Scientists used a technique called nuclear transfer to clone such amphibians as frogs and salamanders as early as the 1950′s. In 1996, a group led by the British scientist Ian Wilmut used the procedure to clone a sheep. The sheep was the first mammal cloned from a donor cell from an adult mammal. They named the clone “Dolly.” Since the cloning of Dolly, scientists from many countries have used a similar technique to produce clones of mice, cattle, cats, and other mammals.

May 17, 2013

Scientists have successfully used cloning to create human embryonic stem cells. As outlined in the latest issue of the journal Cell, this experiment is a step toward developing replacement tissue to treat such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease.

Nuclear transfer, a laboratory technique used to create clones and stem cells, involves injecting a tiny egg cell with the nucleus from a donor. (© Getty Images)

Scientists at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland extracted skin cells from a baby with a genetic disease. They fused the cells with donated human eggs to create embryos. The embryos are genetically identical to the 8-month-old child. They then collected stem cells from the embryos.

The scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, stated that their technique could not lead to the birth of a viable baby. When used with monkeys, the same technique never produced a cloned animal. Their goal, wrote Mitalipov, is therapeutic cloning: that is, producing embryonic stem cells that are genetically identical to a particular patient in order to treat that patient.

The team’s technique has not yet been replicated by a second group of scientists. The researchers must also demonstrate that they can create stem cells from an adult, as most people who would need replacement tissues are likely to be old.

Responding to Mitalipov’s announcement, Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston declared cloning immoral, even if used for therapeutic purposes: [It] “treats human being as products, manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes.”

Additional World Book articles:

• The Dawn of Genetic Engineering (a special report)
• Stem Cells: Seeds of Hope (a special report)
• Tissue Engineering–From Science Fiction to Medical Fact (a special report)

A team of Russian scientists has grown living plants from a flowering plant that died 32,000 years ago. The plant was a type of narrow-leaf campion. Campions, also called catchflies, are a group of flowering plants that have five petals, often cleft or notched (partly divided at the top). Scientists were able to recover fruits of the campion from a squirrel burrow in Siberia, where they had remained frozen for thousands of years. The fruits were collected by an Arctic ground squirrel, which buried them the way modern squirrels do. In this case, the burrow became covered by earth, and the fruits were preserved in permafrost (permanently frozen soil). Scientists recovered the fruits a few years ago and were able to coax cells within them into growing. These cells grew into clones of the long-dead flowers.

Moss campion (far right) is a type of campion that grows in areas too cold and dry for trees to grow. The campion that Russian scientists were able to clone from a frozen seed was a type of Arctic campion. World Book illustration by Kate Lloyd-Jones, Linden Artists Ltd.

The flowers are by far the oldest plants grown from ancient tissue. The previous record was held by a date palm, which was grown from a seed that was 2,000 years old. Seeds usually do not germinate (sprout) after many years.

The scientists tried unsuccessfully to grow flowers from the campion’s seeds. Instead, the researchers were able to grow cells recovered from the fruit. Many plants can grow from tiny parts of a parent, a form of reproduction known as vegetative propagation. The fruits were preserved by the frozen soil. In fact, the fruits were probably frozen shortly after they were buried, because arctic ground squirrels deliberately dig their burrows near frozen soil. In this way, the soil acts as a freezer.

The research will enable scientists to compare the ancient flowers with their living relatives. This work should help scientists understand how the plant has evolved (changed over many generations). The research also raises the possibility that scientists may be able to grow other plants from tissue that has been frozen in soil. It might even be possible to grow plants that have become extinct.

Additional World Book articles:

• Arctic
• Endangered species
• Earth (History of Earth)