The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-28)

A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, MAY 28 , 2022

The World

PERSIAN GULF

Iran seizes 2 Greek

oil tankers i n raids

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
seized two Greek oil tankers
Friday in helicopter-launched
raids in the Persian Gulf, officials
said. The action appeared to be
retaliation for Athens’s
assistance in the U.S. seizure of
crude oil from an Iranian-flagged
tanker this week in the
Mediterranean. T he Islamic
Republic faces crushing
sanctions from Washington.
The raid marks the first major
incident at sea in months as
tensions remain high between
Iran and the West over its
tattered nuclear deal with world
powers.
G reece’s Foreign Ministry said
it made a strong démarche to the

Iranian ambassador in Athens

over the “violent taking over of

two Greek-flagged ships” in the

Persian Gulf. “These acts

effectively amount to acts of

piracy,” a ministry statement

said. The ministry called for the

immediate release of the vessels

and their crews.

— Associated Press

INDIA

7 dead after bus full of

troops falls into gorge

A bus carrying soldiers fell

into a gorge in India’s remote

Ladakh region Friday, killing at

least seven and injuring 19

others, officials said.

The bus plunged off a

mountainous road and rolled

down the 80-foot gorge in the

frigid region’s Nubra Valley,

police said.

Authorities were investigating

whether the accident was caused

by a mechanical failure or driver

negligence. The privately owned

bus was hired by the military to

transport soldiers in the high-

altitude region.

— Associated Press

QATAR

Reporter’s death spurs

threat of ICC case

T he Al Jazeera news network

said it will submit a case to the

International Criminal Court in

the killing of reporter Shireen

Abu Akleh, who was shot this

month during an Israeli raid in

the occupied West Bank.

The Qatar-based network and

the Palestinian Authority have

accused Israeli soldiers of

deliberately killing her. Israel

rejects those allegations as a

“blatant lie.” It says she was shot

during a firefight between

soldiers and Palestinian

militants, and that only ballistic

analysis of the bullet — which is

held by the PA — can determine

who fired the fatal shot.

An AP reconstruction lent

support to witnesses who say the

veteran Palestinian American

correspondent was killed by

Israeli fire.

— Associated Press

Floods damage crops, cut off

communities in Suriname:

Widespread flooding in the

South American country of

Suriname has isolated

communities, devastated crops

and shuttered schools and

businesses, according to

authorities. Heavy rains in recent

days battered the country’s

interior and southern regions,

where farms and electrical and

water purification infrastructure

are underwater, the Caribbean

Disaster Emergency

Management Agency says. The

agency says Suriname’s southern

region is now only accessible by

aircraft or boat, and that further

flooding is possible given

ongoing intense rainfall.

Concerns are growing over the

lack of food and drinking water,

as well as disease outbreaks.

Resurgent violence i n eastern

Congo displaces 72,000 :

Fighting in eastern C ongo over

the past week between the army

and M23 rebel group has forced

more than 72,000 people from

their homes, the United Nations

said Friday. The M23, a rebellion

claiming to represent the

interests of ethnic Tutsis in

eastern Congo, is staging its

largest offensive since a 2012-

2013 insurrection that captured

vast swaths of the countryside.

Of the 72,000 who have fled,

about 7,000 reportedly crossed

into neighboring Uganda, the

U.N. Refugee Agency said.

Archaeologists discover ancient

Mayan city on building site :

Archaeologists uncovered the

ruins of an ancient Mayan city

filled with palaces, pyramids and

plazas at a construction site for

an industrial park near Merida,

on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

“We think more than 4,

people lived here,” said Carlos

Peraza, one of the archaeologists

who led the excavation of the

city, estimated to have been

occupied from 600-900 AD.

— From news services

DIGEST

BY FRANCES VINALL

MELBOURNE, Australia — The
scientist reached into an enclo-
sure in the biosciences building at
the University of Melbourne and
pulled out a dunnart — a mouse-
sized marsupial with huge, inky
black eyes. It latched its teeth onto
developmental biologist Stephen
Frankenberg’s finger. Franken-
berg put it back, and it scampered
into its home of egg cartons and
native grasses.
The tiny creature seems an un-
likely candidate for the closest liv-
ing relative of an apex predator.
But it could be key to bringing the
thylacine — also called the Tasma-
nian tiger — back from extinction.
The enclosure is part of the
university’s newly established Th-
ylacine Integrated Genetic Resto-
ration Research (TIGRR) Lab. A
team of genetic scientists led by
biosciences professor Andrew
Pask is attempting to make the
concept of “de-extinction” a reali-
ty. Over the coming decade, they
plan to use gene editing to turn a
dunnart cell into a thylacine cell
and bring the long-dead creature
into today’s world.
The goal invites an obvious ref-
erence. Pask doesn’t mind.
“I love Jurassic Park!” he said. “I
love it.” He keeps a boxed figurine
of John Hammond, the character
in the 1993 film who creates the
ill-fated park for de-extincted di-
nosaurs, in his office.
Critics call de-extinction proj-
ects expensive follies that distract
from the real work of conservation
and that could have unintended
consequences. But Pask, unlike
the fictional Hammond, says he
has a conservationist’s ethos. Aus-
tralia has the fastest rate of mam-
mal extinction in the world, driv-
en primarily by invasive species
such as foxes and feral cats, and
changing wildfire patterns. He
hopes the scientific advances that
will be necessary to restore the
thylacine will help endangered
animals still hanging on to surviv-
al.
“When people say, ‘Didn’t we
learn anything from Jurassic
Park?’ — well, it’s very different
bringing back a velociraptor to a
thylacine,” he said.
Pask’s favorite vanished species
was native to the Australian island
of Tasmania. The thylacine looked
somewhat like a small wolf with a
distinctive striped back, jaws that
opened 90 degrees and a pouch on
its belly, like a kangaroo’s, for car-
rying young. The last known indi-
vidual, named Benjamin, died in a
Hobart zoo in 1936.
Here’s the plan to bring it back:
First, turn dunnart cells into thy-
lacine cells using gene-editing
technology. Then use the thyla-
cine cells to create an embryo,
either in a petri dish or the womb
of a living animal. Implant the
embryo into a female marsupial
such as a quoll, and watch the
quoll give birth to a thylacine baby.
When the baby is old enough to
leave the quoll pouch, raise it into
adulthood. Repeat and establish a
healthy population, with the goal
of releasing thylacines into the
wild.
“It is certainly feasible,” said
Owain Edwards, Environmental
Synthetic Genomics group leader
at the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organi-
zation, who is not involved in the
project. “Absolutely. What they’re
proposing to do, can be done.
What isn’t clear to anybody yet is:
What exactly will result from it?
Because it will never be a pure
thylacine.”
Gene editing is different from
another process with a foothold in
the public imagination — cloning.
Unlike in cloning, the cell that
resulted from the TIGRR Lab’s
work would not contain an exact
copy of a thylacine genome. It
would be a part-dunnart, part-thy-
lacine hybrid. “I don’t know
whether it’s going to be 99 percent
thylacine or 99.99 percent thyla-

cine or 78 percent thylacine,” Pask

said. “We will be able to bring back

something.” The approach is simi-

lar to a U.S. effort to de-extinct the

woolly mammoth by editing el-

ephant DNA.

Paul Thomas, a molecular biol-

ogist with the University of Ade-

laide who is also not involved in

the TIGRR Lab, has doubts the

extensive genome editing that

would be required — he is reluc-

tant to call it a de-extinction — will

be feasible within the next decade.

The dunnart and thylacine ge-

nomes have “probably hundreds

of thousands — probably millions

— of differences,” he said. “It’s an

interesting approach, but it’s cer-

tainly going to be a long and diffi-

cult project.”

Elsewhere in the lab sat a re-

minder of the impact humans

have already had on Mother Na-

ture: the cane toad. Brown and

wart-covered, four poisonous in-

dividuals stared out of their tank

with a torpidity that belied the

havoc their species has wrought.

The cane toad was introduced

to Australia in the 1930s with the

idea that they would eat a sugar-

cane-devouring beetle. Their pres-

ence had “no effect at all” on the

beetle, Frankenberg said, but they

devastated the native animal pop-

ulation. There are now about 200

million cane toads in the country

— so many that, in the competi-

tion for food and the absence of

other predators, they have turned

cannibalistic.

Now scientists hope new tech-

nology can remedy the mistake.

One of Frankenberg’s offshoot

projects is an attempt to edit the

DNA of native animals to develop

resistance to cane toad poison.

He’s starting with the northern

quoll, a cat-size marsupial.

“Species in South America that

have co-evolved with the cane

toad over millions of years are

genetically resistant to the toxin,”

he said. “And it’s known what gene

is responsible for that.”

If the gene-edited quolls are not

affected by the poison, they are

more likely to thrive in the wild.

“And then they’re natural preda-

tors of the cane toads,” said Gerard

Tarulli, another developmental bi-

ologist in the lab.

Genetic material from museum

specimens could be added to a

wild gene pool to increase its over-

all health. The lab plans to develop

a biobank of frozen marsupial

cells so individuals could be

cloned and released. Another

project would use a controversial

technology called gene drive: edit-

ing the DNA of unwanted species

such as foxes so they produce only

male offspring.

“There's a lot of power in this

technology,” Pask said. “And it's

stuff we just don't even have the

basics figured out for marsupials

yet, but we'll do it in this project.”

The idea of meddling with the

DNA of wild animals to save them

does not sit well with everyone.

Scientists, ethicists and environ-

mentalists have raised objections

to the idea of unleashing gene-ed-

ited creatures — including those

that used to be extinct — without

fully understanding the potential

consequences. Cam Walker, a

spokesman for Friends of the

Earth Australia, says gene editing

introduces new risks to ecosys-

tems when people should be fo-

cused on preserving the natural

world.

“We do not support gene edit-

ing in conservation,” he said. “The

entire process involves many ran-

dom e vents whose end results can-

not be predicted.”

Around the TIGRR Lab, a fa-

vored slogan is “turning science

fiction into science fact.” Down the

hall from Pask’s office, doctoral

student Tiffany Morelande pi-

petted green droplets of cell ma-

terial from a mouse skull into a

machine, to compare it with the

genetic workings of a thylacine

skull.

Nearby, Tarulli sat behind the

screen of a powerful, giant micro-

scope in its own closet-sized room,

watching cells interact with repro-

ductive hormones. Downstairs,

Frankenberg checked on the dun-

narts. A molecular biologist

named Axel Newton, in a white

coat in another section of the lab,

said he still can’t quite believe he

could be taking the first steps

toward bringing an animal back

from extinction. He added nutri-

ents to a collection of cells to make

them grow. “This is how it hap-

pens,” he said. “You start here.”

Australian scientists are trying to bring

a native tiger back from extinction

However, meddling with the DNA of wild animals to save them does not sit well with some critics

ALANA HOLMBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

M olecular biologist Axel Newton lifts cryogenically frozen cells out of liquid nitrogen storage this month in Melbourne, Australia. Newton

helped establish the Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab at the University of Melbourne.

JOHN CARNEMOLLA/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

ABOVE: The thylacine, also called the Tasmanian tiger, looked

somewhat like a small wolf with a distinctive striped back. The last

known thylacine died in a Hobart zoo in 1936. BELOW: Andrew

Pask and Newton inspect a box of thylacine skulls at the Tiegs

Zoology Museum in Australia.

ALANA HOLMBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST ALANA HOLMBERG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST