Cat's long lost relatives won't be visiting him anytime soon...

I just read an article that a friend of ours might be interested in ;). Its about cats, actually tigers, but they are part of the feline family anyway. The article is actually quite saddening as its about why scientists are giving up a project to clone the extinct Tasmanian Tigers. Too bad, cos I really wonder what would happen if they succeeded. Would they clone other extinct creatures too? Will "Jurassic Park" become a reality? More Ang Bao for Cat? But the good news is that they are giving it up so that the resources can be put to other uses like saving endangered species, which is still great.

The more than $350,000 spent trying to clone the extinct Tasmanian tiger had gone to "pie in the sky" science and it was sensible for the Australian Museum to have abandoned the project, scientists said yesterday. A University of Tasmania zoologist, Randolph Rose, said millions of dollars more would be needed to try to resurrect the thylacine and this money could be better spent on living animals such as Tasmanian devils, which have been ravaged by a mysterious facial tumour disease.

"Let's save what we've got before spending huge amounts of money on a very difficult problem," he said. "Cloning an extinct animal is pie in the sky science."A La Trobe University researcher, Mike Westerman, said it was a pity the project had been stopped. "But available resources are limited and it is an eminently sensible decision.

What they are trying to do is far too difficult, given our state of knowledge."The museum team had worked out the partial code of two genes from parts of the cell called mitochondria, and the partial code of one gene from the nucleus. Tasmanian tigers had about 17 mitochondrial genes and 30,000 nuclear genes."The technical difficulties are immense.

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