 Dramatic Music Music Come here to the ballroom Dang, you have pretty eyes Music Mr. Green jeans is a cloned cat that carries a gene that is called green fluorescent protein This gene integrates in his genome, in his chromatin, in his chromosome, in his cells and expresses a fluorescence that is green I am a senior scientist at the Audible Research Center for Endangered Species and I work basically in interspecies cloning Music One of the century's greatest scientific achievements was unveiled before the eyes of a stunned world Her name was Dolly the Sheep Each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science I believe we must respect this profound gift and resist the temptation to replicate ourselves Cloning is probably still a controversial technology If you survey Americans you'll still get a huge percentage of people that say cloning is morally wrong that it opens up Pandora's box, that we're going to clone humans next sort of all these hypothetical sci-fi scenarios and that hasn't changed, but I think as cloning has sort of fallen off of front pages scientists have sort of had some space to quietly go about their work without stirring up controversy at every turn Music The Audible Center for Research of Endangered Species, or ACERS as many people call it for short is a facility in New Orleans that is devoted to using advanced reproductive technology to help endangered species breed and survive and thrive We work in assisted reproductive technologies I specialize in cats and in wild cats Music Cloning provides a way to help endangered species reproduce So if their numbers are dwindling and they're not reproducing well in captivity you could maybe take a skin sample from an endangered animal and use it to create an identical twin A lab that focuses exclusively on the cloning of endangered or threatened species is pretty rare There are not a lot of scientists that are focusing full time on that application of cloning Music So cloning from Dolly through the kind of cloning that ACERS is doing is generally done through a procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer And a somatic cell is basically any cell in an animal's body that's not a sperm cell or an egg cell So it could be a skin cell, a muscle cell, something from the body Music And so if scientists want to clone say a wild cat they'll take a skin sample from that cat and they can fuse that skin cell with an egg Music Can you see the DNA here outside? Music When that happens the DNA from the wild cat from that skin cell enters the egg Music And as the egg turns into an embryo as it grows and divides it has the DNA that came from that skin cell This sort of cloned embryo can then be implanted in a surrogate mother say an average house cat that will carry the embryo to term if all goes well and eventually give birth to this cloned wild cat kitten Music A lot of what they're learning about cat reproduction and cat cloning could be applied to, you know, one hopes anything from cheetahs to lions, tigers any of those endangered cat species The other development that I think is really positive and really exciting is the creation of these frozen zoos Frozen zoos allow scientists to store cells and DNA from animals for hundreds of years And so if a certain genetic lineage dies out we have that cell, we have that DNA and scientists a hundred years from now could potentially clone it back into existence Music One of the criticisms you hear a lot is that cloning is this high-tech sexy spectacle and some scientists think that it actually distracts from these other sort of more basic efforts and the big problem right now is a lot of these animals have their habitats being destroyed their habitats are disappearing so until we can make sure that there's a safe place to release these animals where they won't just be hunted into extinction again it doesn't make much sense to bring a lot of animals back Music Animals, vegetation, human beings we live together and human beings are covering the space of the animals and we are destroying them in some way because we are destroying the environment we are destroying the animals indirectly I believe that we need to preserve the animals are part of this planet and are part of our life and we want the children and the future generations being able to enjoy what we enjoy Music