The Eye of the Tiger

-Jennifer McGovern

You are inches from the tiger's face and staring into deep, empty eyes. It looks oddly small and vulnerable, curled into a fetal position. It's about 3 feet long and resembles a puppy on the verge of adolescence. When it awakens, it will stalk and hunt through the wilderness of Tasmania in the Pieman River region in the island's northwest. This is its country.

As the bright, melting orange sun beats down, you see it's swift and agile, and as front and back paws meet, it's as though it's flying. It is old, so the dark stripes across its tan-colored back have dulled since youth. But for now it sleeps.

You donÍt experience a feeling of exhilaration or danger this close to its body, but perhaps sadness because this thylacine will never awaken--it is dead--and so is its species. All that is left is this curled-up, preserved carcass, encased in glass at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

The thylacine lasted until Sept. 7, 1936, when the "last known specimen died in captivity in the Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart." The Tasmanian tiger had a name, Benjamin, and this was the endling, the last surviving individual of a species. "Rapid loss of native species led to the idea of Australia as a vulnerable land; its fauna ïsecond-rate mammals," the museum says. "In the popular and scientific imagination the Tasmanian tiger has become emblematic of these historical extinctions."

There have been unverified claims of sightings since the thylacine was declared extinct, although scientists say it's highly unlikely the Tasmanian tiger could survive undetected for nearly 70 years. Now Michael Archer and a team of fellow Australian scientists have decided to wake up the Tasmanian tiger. The cloning process has already begun, using DNA found from the preserved embryo of a thylacine that died in 1866.

The Tasmanian tiger is not actually a tiger at all--it's not even related to a tiger or cat. Instead, it's a striped, carnivorous, marsupial, with its closest relative the Tasmanian devil or numbat. A typical thylacine had between 13 and 19 stripes, the longest on its rump and upper thigh. These stripes were brighter and more visible during youth.

A century before the last thylacine died in captivity, the Tasmanian government began paying a bounty to have the animals destroyed because the 'tiger' was blamed for the widespread death of livestock, especially sheep. Even earlier, Tasmanians took it upon themselves to trap and shoot the thylacine, until, even better, the government began paying one pound for every dead one. The payments continued until 1909, but it was not until 1936 that they were declared protected animals, ironically only months before Benjamin died.

With cloning, ethical considerations and science don't always agree. The cloning of an extinct animal is even more controversial. When cloning a living animal, DNA is readily available and is in perfect condition. Once DNA is extracted, it's then placed in the empty egg of a mother of the same species. For example, pigs have been cloned in the wombs of other pigs and goats in goats, but cross-species cloning, although attempted, has never worked.

Beyond such technical concerns, animals become extinct for a reason. If the thylacine were meant to still be on Earth, it would be here. God doesn't make mistakes. If God had intended for the Tasmanian tiger to be here, He would have left the species somewhere. Archer has replied to religious groups who have attacked his project by saying, "My response is that people played God when we exterminated the animal in the first place." God was playing God when the animal was exterminated in the first place. If He wanted to save the thylacine, guns would have ceased to exist, maybe a few 'tigers' would have escaped the settlers and remained hidden in the thick of the Tasmanian wilderness all these decades, or perhaps there would have been more to begin with--the animal was never common. Maybe the thylacine population wouldnÍt have been made to suffer widespread disease from 1908 through 1909, from which the species never recovered, or humans would never have imported dingoes to the Australian mainland and the island of New Guinea, where the thylacine also once roamed before the dingoes killed them thousands of years ago.

Besides advances in science, there are few positive aspects to humans recreating life in test tubes. Children can still be educated about an extinct species and see pictures. They won't be able to go to the zoo and poke at one or watch one roam its cage, but this doesn't create enough of a reason to resurrect the species.

Strong opposition to plans for cloning the thylacine have already emerged, and the scientists have experienced picketers and critics from all over the world. The criticism comes not only from religious groups, but also from peers in the science community, but in the press Archer and colleague Don Colgan defend the scientific importance of their project: "The impact of Australian science has been declining for at least 10 years. We need 'thylacine' projects to demonstrate our scientific confidence. If we can't be prepared for big challenges (and possibly failure) then the nation must inevitably become a scientific backwater."

However, the team fails to focus enough concern on the ethical and cultural implications of cloning an extinct species. They are apparently more worried about Australia's image as an advancing nation and how the country looks to the rest of the world. And this approach to making Australia look scientifically 'ahead' may take a turn for the worse.

As cross-species cloning has never been successful, who knows what this possible creation will turn out to be? Wouldn't the joke be on them if millions of dollars and years were spent to clone the thylacine and it turned out to be a monster? Or would the joke be on the world? For now, the thylacine sleeps peacefully and you can get close enough to look into its deep, empty eyes.