Tucked inside Carl Zimmer's wonderful and thorough feature on
de-extinction, a topic that got a TEDx coming out party last
week, we find a tantalizing, heartbreaking anecdote about the
time scientists briefly, briefly brought an extinct species back
to life. The story begins in 1999, when scientists determined
that there was a single remaining bucardo, a wild goat native to
the Pyrenees, left in the world. They named her Celia and
wildlife veterinarian Alberto Fernández-Arias put a radio collar
around her neck. She died nine months later in January 2000,
crushed by a tree. Her cells, however, were preserved. Working
with the time's crude life sciences tools, José Folch led a
Franco-Spanish team that attempted to bring the bucardo, as a
species, back from the dead. It was not pretty. They injected
the nuclei from Celia's cells into goat eggs that had been
emptied of their DNA, then implanted 57 of them into different
goat surrogate mothers. Only seven goats got pregnant, and of
those, six had miscarriages. Whi