Dead for 32,000 Years, an Arctic Plant Is Revived

I had a similar reaction. Then read the article, starts off fairly straight-forward, no drama, etc. and then there's this fun paragraph from out of left field:

"Tragedy has now struck the Russian team. Dr. Gilichinksy, its leader, was hospitalized with an asthma attack and unable to respond to questions, his daughter Yana said on Friday. On Saturday, Dr. Price reported that Dr. Gilichinsky had died of a heart attack."

exactly...my first thought was how this seems like a stones throw away from jurassic park.

"Tragedy has now struck the Russian team. Dr. Gilichinksy, its leader, was hospitalized with an asthma attack and unable to respond to questions, his daughter Yana said on Friday. On Saturday, Dr. Price reported that Dr. Gilichinsky had died of a heart attack."

now...thats the scariest part of that article

This is a common reaction to stories about resurrecting ancient species, but I wonder if it really just means that disaster movies are silly, rather than that these activities are risky.

After all, when we consider ancient, extinct species, the organisms in question are likely ill-adapted to survive in the present day. By virtue of having gone extinct, it is a truism that they were ill-adapted to survive the past era in which they disappeared as well.

In this case, the plant is nearly identical to its modern relative, but even if we brought back to life a plant or animal that disappeared thousands of years ago, it would be incredibly difficult for it to survive. For one thing, it would typically need other members of the opposite sex with which to breed. It would also be adapted to thrive in a much different environment than today's. These are substantial challenges.

Of course, it's possible that reintroducing an ancient species to the present day would be similar to introducing a non-native species to, say, Australia. I'm also not keen on the prospect of reviving ancient microbes and viruses. But I'm not worried about this plant, or about dinosaurs, for that matter.

Yes, this allows them to directly sequence the genome of an "internal" node of the tree of life, whereas normally we only get to sequence the leaf nodes (extant species).

Well, we don't know what life was like with this "extinct" plant species, so we can't really tell yet if it has practical utility for humans (for example, producing a previously-unknown antifungal agent).

However, the ability to rescue species from extinction is a very useful tool to have lying around, in case a plant critical to modern life is pushed to extinction.

Every plant can be used for something.

Often, blue sky research has the best ROI. You get smart people working really hard on it. There's a lot less crap to deal with, so they are totally focused on solving the problem. And the problems are actually quite clear cut (is the plant back from the dead yet?), so a lot of management issues disappear. A well defined (yet useless) goal is easier to manage than a wishy-washy "improve it, but don't change anything".

See daviddoran's comment and rcthompson's reply

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3614304

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/32-000-year-old-pla...