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Bringing the Tasmanian tiger back to life

KERRY O'BRIEN: Reminiscent of Jurassic Park, scientists claim to be a step closer to bringing back the extinct Tasmanian tiger. The Australian Museum today announced it had successfully extracted large amounts of DNA from a 134-year-old specimen.

Finding the animal's DNA code relatively intact was vital to the success of an attempt to recreate the animal through cloning.

What was considered a far-fetched project just a year ago is now edging closer to becoming reality. The ABC's science and environmental reporter Michael Troy.

MIKE ARCHER, DIRECTOR, AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM: Nothing in the world could be more exciting than this. This is the equivalent, the biological equivalent, of that first step on the moon.

DON COLGAN, AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM: The loss of a thylacine was in one sense, equivalent to the loss of all the cats -- the panthers, tigers, lions -- all at once.

MICHAEL TROY: Don Colgan is the scientist with the Jurassic assignment. For a year, the molecular geneticist has been trying to find a way to reassemble the extinct thylacine, or as it was commonly known, Tasmanian tiger.

DON COLGAN: The technology is now almost at a stage where you can give it a question and say it will provide a solution.

MICHAEL TROY: To have any hope of resurrecting the thylacine, its full DNA or genetic code, needed to be found.

DON COLGAN: The final complexity of the project really depends on how many pieces we have to put together. The larger the pieces of DNA that we find initially, the easier it will be later.

MICHAEL TROY: Lachlan Mairs is an archaeozoologist specialising in extracting DNA from ancient sites of human remains in Syria, Israel and Egypt.

Getting DNA from the museum's pup was a relatively easy task, given the thylacine was advertently placed in the perfect DNA preservative more than 130 years ago.

LACHLAN MAIRS, ARCHEOZOOLOGIST: Provided it's only been in alcohol, the alcohol actually preserves the DNA extraordinarily well.

MICHAEL TROY: Since the idea was first mooted a year ago, international interest has intensified, with Discovery Channel buying the documentary rights.

Luckily and surprisingly, many of the internal organs were not discarded when the pup was preserved, allowing the scientists to extract 10 tissue samples, two from bone marrow.

The samples were cooked in an incubator and placed in a centrifuge to remove the proteins and cellular debris. But the DNA needed to be free from contamination, especially from humans that may have handled the pup decades ago.

MIKE ARCHER: We might have this terrible prospect of reconstructing one of our old curators rather than a thylacine! But as he probed deeper into the carcass and got into tissues that could not have been touched by humans, that's when the excitement really began to develop.

Because not only did he start getting DNA that clearly was thylacine DNA, but he began to get huge chunks of DNA.

MICHAEL TROY: What would you say to the person who originally preserved the thylacine, then?

MIKE ARCHER: I would grab that guy with his great hairy beard sitting around his little fireplace in Tasmania and give him a big kiss. He's done a wonderful thing for science.

MICHAEL TROY: The driving force behind the project, museum director Mike Archer, admits he's obsessed with the Tasmanian tiger, but denies the project is a fundraising publicity stunt.

MIKE ARCHER: As director of the Australian Museum, it's my job to make sure that nothing we undertake in this way is spurious or silly.

I mean, I want to know that good science is being done at every step along this path. And that's exactly what's happening here.

MICHAEL TROY: The Tasmanian tiger is also the symbol of a much wider tragedy. It was one of 54 unique Australian species driven to extinction in just 200 years.

Nearly 1,500 other creatures are currently listed as threatened or in danger. The thylacine, though, has captured people's imagination. This, the last-known thylacine, died in Hobart zoo in 1936.

The animal was the last in a family of unique marsupials, with a head like a dog and large powerful jaws, stripes like a tiger and a pouch like a kangaroo.

Accused of preying on stock, the thylacine was officially hunted for decades, until it finally disappeared.

BOB CARR, NSW PREMIER: From this project, let's take a reminder -- we shouldn't see any other of our special Australian animals -- they're all special, they're all unique -- be lost to the world.

MICHAEL TROY: With the official release of today's news that the DNA has been found, the next step is to catalogue and reconstitute the thylacine's genetic sequences and then inject the cells into the embryo of a living surrogate animal.

The two hosts now being considered are close relatives of the thylacine -- the numbat or Tasmanian devil.

MIKE ARCHER: Either of those two animals could serve as a surrogate mother for the thylacine's DNA.

After all, when marsupials are born and the thylacine is a good marsupial, the baby wouldn't be any bigger than the tiny -- the fingernail on your little finger. So none of them are going to have problem giving birth to this animal.

MICHAEL TROY: The research to get to the final stage of the cloning process, though, could cost up to $80 million. But already, financial backers are emerging.

RANDOLPH GRIFFITHS, RHEUBEN GRIFFITHS TRUST FUND: We're putting in some seed funding and we do that with open eyes and knowing that it might go nowhere and it's a pleasure for us to do so, just to give back to society.

I think that Australians, we're privileged and if we can afford to give back, we should.

MICHAEL TROY: The ultimate aim of the project is to eventually return the thylacine to the wild, creating a viable population by cloning other specimens held around Australia.

As to when that might happen --

MIKE ARCHER: I'm confident now it'll certainly be within my lifetime and I'd like to think even before I retire. Michael, you and I will probably be able to see one rolled off the assembly line, I hope within the next 10 years.

KERRY O'BRIEN: A fascinating prospect.



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