There was a moment in 2008 when Michael Mahony realised the ambitious project he’d signed up for years earlier might actually work.<\/p>\n
Looking under a microscope, a few tiny brown cells had begun to split, and when he first saw them, he let out an excited gasp.<\/p>\n
“Two or three out of the 50 started to divide,” the University of Newcastle frog biologist says.<\/p>\n
The cells contained the DNA of a frog that had been extinct for decades, and it seemed the genetic information was starting to awaken.<\/p>\n
“What else can this be but the gastric brooding frog brought back?”<\/p>\n
The project was trying to do the impossible: de-extinct an animal.<\/p>\n
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Even the name the research team chose \u2014 Project Lazarus \u2014 showed how far-fetched this whole scientific endeavour was.<\/p>\n
In the biblical story, Lazarus was a dead man that Jesus brought back to life.<\/p>\n
Unlike Lazarus, who had been entombed for just four days, the team was trying to bring back a frog that had been dead (and stuffed in a freezer) for decades.<\/p>\n
But, at least for a brief moment, they thought they’d made a genetic miracle happen.<\/p>\n
The gastric brooding frog’s demise<\/p>\n
Professor Mahony spent a decent chunk of the 1980s trudging through rainforests looking for frogs that had become increasingly difficult to find.<\/p>\n
“We started to have a sense that things weren’t right, because we couldn’t find [frogs] in lots of places where they used to be,” he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We knew something was wrong.”<\/p>\n
Among the many species of frogs that went extinct during that time, two species \u2014 the northern and southern gastric brooding frog \u2014 were particularly unusual, even in the weird world of frogs.<\/p>\n
The two species were the only frogs that looked after their young in their stomach.<\/p>\n
Once a female’s eggs were fertilised, she would swallow them, and they would remain in her stomach through the entire tadpole stage. After the tadpoles turned into froglets, the mother would vomit them back up, and her babies would leap out to start their lives.<\/p>\n
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Gastric brooding frogs grew their young inside the mother’s stomach. (Supplied: Anna Guerrero\/Embryo Project Encyclopedia\/CC BY-NC-SA 3.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n The first gastric brooding frog to be identified \u2014 the southern species \u2014 was discovered in 1973 near Brisbane. Just seven years later, it could no longer be found in the wild, and was assumed extinct.<\/p>\n “Then in 1984 while doing field work in the rainforest of Queensland \u2026 we discovered a second species,” Professor Mahony says.<\/p>\n But the excitement and fanfare this second frog discovery attracted was even more short lived.<\/p>\n “By the end of 1986, it unfortunately also disappeared in the wild.”<\/p>\n The culprit? A fungus called chytrid, which had been spreading around the world undetected in the years prior.<\/p>\n The fungus thickens a frog’s skin, disrupting its ability to balance salt and water levels, and can even stop it breathing.<\/p>\n “Since the late 1980s it has been a constant battle to map this disease and try to understand which frogs will be next to to go,” Professor Mahony says.<\/p>\n “In the past decade \u2026 we described something like six new species of Australian frogs, and four of them, the moment they were described, were listed as endangered.”<\/p>\n It’s this threat that prompted Professor Mahony to think about ambitious ways to bring back these frogs.<\/p>\n “Of course, it’s far better that animals and plants are protected and don’t get to the problem of going extinct,” he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n “What we now know is most animals that are going extinct, it has been human cause. It’s our responsibility.”From thylacines to frogs<\/p>\n Project Lazarus was the brain child of Michael Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales who has long had an interest in de-extinction.<\/p>\n The project’s first attempt \u2014 to de-extinct a Tasmanian tiger \u2014 was unsuccessful.<\/p>\n According to Andrew Pask, who is a professor of genetics at the University of Melbourne and the chief biology officer of Colossal Biosciences, this is unsurprising. \u00a0<\/p>\n Professor Pask was not involved with Project Lazarus but is currently working on another effort to bring back the thylacine.<\/p>\n “[During Project Lazarus], we didn’t even have the human genome, so suggesting that we could sequence an extinct animal genome was a very bold vision,” he says.<\/p>\n But according to Professor Pask, even attempting it makes Professor Archer “a visionary”, and would provide a new direction for the team.\u00a0<\/p>\n Following his failed Tasmanian tiger de-extinction attempt, Professor Archer and his colleagues turned to something arguably more achievable \u2014 a frog.<\/p>\n “All our initial cloning [knowledge] came from frogs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Way before we had Dolly the sheep, [scientists] perfected all of that work in amphibians,” Professor Pask says.<\/p>\n When the Lazarus team confirmed there was a gastric brooding frog carcass in one of their researcher’s freezers, it was decided.<\/p>\n One of only a few museum specimens of the southern gastric brooding frog. (Museums Victoria Collection: Benjamin Healley\/CC BY 4.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n Translation biologist Andrew French, one of two cloning experts on the team, noted when they thawed the tissue, the cells “seemed to be all intact”.<\/p>\n Because the DNA was going to be moved into a surrogate egg, “all that matters is that it’s intact and the DNA can be transferred”, he says.<\/p>\n In 2008, after finding an appropriate surrogate species, the team got to work to try to resurrect the gastric brooding frog.\u00a0<\/p>\n Almost immediately they had success: the tiny brown cells would divide, providing evidence of the very beginning of life.<\/p>\n “The problem was, within the next 24 hours \u2026 the embryos would start to die,” Professor Mahony recalls.<\/p>\n An attempt to bring back the gastric brooding frog was ambitious, and ultimately unsuccessful.\u00a0 (Getty Images: Auscape\/Universal Images Group)<\/p>\n They tried again and again, year after year, to push the research further. Every time, they came up blank.\u00a0<\/p>\n Eventually, in 2013, the team published what they had achieved so far \u2014 to plenty of excitement<\/a>. But after a few more unsuccessful years, Project Lazarus was put back on ice.<\/p>\n Controversy over de-extinction efforts\u00a0<\/p>\n Scientists have long been divided on bringing back creatures from the dead.<\/p>\n Project Lazarus was “criticised fairly roundly by other scientists at the time”, Professor Mahony says.<\/p>\n “People say, ‘Let’s spend the little money for conservation on saving what we’ve got, not on wild goose chases to bring something back.'”\u00a0<\/p>\n Questions over claims dire wolves are back <\/a><\/p>\n A US startup claims to have brought an extinct species back into existence. It’s prompted debate about the difference of resurrecting an extinct species and genetically modifying an existing one.<\/p>\n Today, with a new generation of de-extinction efforts underway, the techniques have changed, but the criticism has only grown louder.<\/p>\n Professor Pask experienced this first hand working for Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology company that recently announced it had brought back the dire wolf<\/a> to much controversy<\/a>.<\/p>\n “As scientists, we’re kind of ingrained to follow the slow and steady pathway, but that doesn’t make for breakthroughs,” he says.<\/p>\n “Our planet is in a biodiversity crisis. We need breakthroughs to solve these big problems.”<\/p>\n But even once a breakthrough occurs, and an extinct creature makes it back from the dead, there is still much work to do to ensure the resurrected animal doesn’t meet the same fate the second time around.<\/p>\n Chytrid fungus, which killed the gastric brooding frog, is still wiping out frog species in Australia and around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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