Last week, Japanese scientists at the RIKEN research institute in Yokohama announced a breakthrough discovery in cloning techniques. Only, the breakthrough wasn’t in the technique itself; they used the same Nuclear Transfer Method that’s being used more and more often these days with prized livestock. No, the breakthrough was that they grew the clones from DNA in cells that had been dead and frozen for sixteen fucking years.

Team Leader and Mouse Cloning Expert Teruhiko Wakayama performed the experiment with some dead mice that had been kept frozen for sixteen years in one of the institute’s freezers. I can’t say why anyone put old dead mice in the freezer in the first place, but I suppose it’s understandable, in a way, that once they were in there, well… you know how old stuff tends to build up in the freezer. From an archaeological standpoint, it would help to know what the mice were next to when they were found in the freezer. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that it was half of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s “Chubby Hubby.”

At any rate, the reason that any of this matters is that until now, freezing was considered to be a very effective method of totally ruining the fuck out of a living cell. Not just because the cell dies, but also because, in the process, water molecules (ice crystals) within the cells expand, harden, and eventually burst the cells open. This bursting effect is considered to be the main obstacle of making Cryogenics work.

Wakayama didn’t have any ideas for bringing the original mice back to life, but he did realize that, if an intact DNA sample could be found within the burst cells, he might be able to use it to clone new copies of the dead mice. And this is exactly what he did. Just like in regular cloning, Wakayama’s team injected the dead DNA nucleus into a living mouse egg, applied a catalyst to trick the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized, popped it into a mouse, and bammo, the Frankenstein eggs started growing and dividing just like any other eggs. It’s rather gruesome if you think about it, but it’s also pretty damn impressive that it actually worked.

Extrapolating, it follows that we ought to be able to do this with any old dead frozen thing, provided that old dead frozen thing has at least one strand of DNA intact. Commentators have suggested that this is the method which may finally enable us to clone extinct animals like those Wooly Mammoths that have been frozen for some 40,000-odd years in arctic permafrost, bringing us one step closer to Wooly Mammoths at the zoo.

Taking this idea even further, it stands to reason that these extensions of the Nuclear Transfer Method ought to work in the resurrection of all sorts of more recently extinct creatures. In terms of post-colonial karma, I can think of no better candidate for resurrection than the Dodo, whose wholesale slaughter so clearly demonstrated the concept of extinction to the world. It’s significant to point out that there haven’t been any successfully cloned birds yet, which may mean that bird cloning is just more difficult. In 1999, a group in New Zealand organized an effort to clone the extinct Huia bird from preserved remains, but, as one source reports,

“One of the primary sponsors involved was an Internet startup named cyberuni.org, inc. which no longer exists and whose domain now points to a porn web site. No news regarding actual progress in cloning the Huia has been released beyond the initial conference reports.”

At any rate, the point is, you can make clones from dead, frozen animals. Even Walt Disney.