Imagine if creatures long gone from the face of the earth could walk its plains, swim its seas or dart across its skies again. What if the dodo bird stopped being just a caricature in books and became a living attraction? What if the woolly mammoth stomped right out of the Ice Age movies and romped around with modern-day mammals? Is even thinking of bringing dead animals back to life a matter of science fiction, or science fact?

Last week, Japanese scholars took small strides towards making these giant leaps of the imagination sound, at the very least, a lot less impossible. Researchers from the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan successfully produced clones of dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years, possibly paving the way for “resurrecting extinct animals”, reported National Geographic News.

To produce the clones, the geneticists injected nuclei from the brain cells of frozen mice into unfertilized mouse eggs whose DNA had been removed, recounted Times Online. Four mice were made initially, then another nine were manufactured by combining the cells of different embryos. The method of nuclear transfer employed was essentially the same albeit with modifications as that used to create the Dolly the sheep, the world's first successfully cloned mammal, said the Independent.

Bringing back extinct species was only one of the possibilities raised by the Japanese geneticists' feat. “Cloning animals by nuclear transfer provides an opportunity to preserve endangered mammalian species,” the scientists said in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “However, it has been suggested that the 'resurrection' of frozen extinct species (such as the woolly mammoth) is impracticable, as no live cells are available, and the genomic material that remains is inevitably degraded.”

But their recent findings suggest otherwise, as the geneticists proved that frozen cells can also be successfully used for cloning, according to CNN. “[It] gives some hope for those who might seek to clone extinct species from frozen carcasses,” Teruhiko Wakayama, the leader of the study, was quoted as saying.

“The newly developed technology of nucleus transfer greatly improved the possibility of reviving extinct animals,” the research team was further quoted as saying by the Agence France-Presse. “Even though reviving extinct animals is often described in films and novels—such as in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park— it had in reality been impossible.”

Even so, just because mice have been brought back from the dead doesn't mean other animals—such as the mammoth, a favorite candidate for cloning because of the number of specimens discovered preserved in ice—can be too.

“If you're just running around and found some frozen extinct animal, you're still going to have to have a suitable womb, and a suitable egg,” Kenneth White, head of the Animal, Dairy and Veterinary Sciences Department at Utah State University, told ABC News. He noted that it is not known if the egg of the elephant is compatible with DNA from its ancestor, or if the mammoth's closest living relative can even be a suitable surrogate. “We know what a gestation period is for an elephant; we don't know what it is for a woolly mammoth,” White added. “We know what to feed an elephant; we don't know what to feed a woolly mammoth.”

There's also the question of whether any creature can actually be brought back to life through cloning. After all, it is only the genomes of animals, and not the animals themselves, that are replicated. According to Steve Connor of the Independent, saying that an animal has been resurrected because one with its exact genetic makeup has been produced is just like saying that a dead person can be “raised from the dead” because he has a living identical twin.

“What concerns some people is whether these sorts of scientific developments will lead to individuals storing their bodies, or parts of them, in order that their cells might be cloned in the future—if or when it is scientifically and legally possible to do so,” he added. Amidst controversy, the body of legendary American baseball player Ted Williams has been preserved cryogenically by his son since 2002 in hopes of perhaps reviving him in the future.

Until the next major scientific breakthrough, though, both mammoths and men will have to wait in line behind their smaller mammalian counterparts for the contentious chance to live again.

Photo: “1,000,000 BC” by ecstaticist, taken from Flickr.com. Licensed under Creative Commons license number BY-NC-ND-2.0-DEED.EN.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."