Labs may help bring back rhino

Adrian Blomfield

in Nairobi Scientists and conservationists are to step up a desperate drive to save the northern white rhino from extinction using “Jurassic Park” technology after the death of its last male specimen was announced on Tuesday.

Sudan, on whose shoulders the hopes of the northern white once rested, was put down in Kenya after months of progressive sickness, a moment that could make the extinction of the subspecies inevitable.

But moments before they euthanised it, staff at the Ol Pejeta conservancy carried out a potentially vital procedure on the old, ailing bull. Using a swab, they extracted a cell sample that could just possibly mean that Sudan might achieve after death what he failed to do in 45 years of life: produce an heir. To do so, however, would require an unprecedented technological feat — the creation of a rhino in a laboratory, a breakthrough that remains well beyond the scope of scientists today.

But Sudan’s handlers at Dvur Kralove, the zoo in the Czech Republic that owned Sudan and organised his transfer to Kenya in 2009, believe that advances in cellular technology mean that there is hope in the future for the northern white.

“We must take advantage of the unique situation in which cellular technologies are utilised for conservation of critically endangered species,” Jan Stejskal, the zoo’s director of international projects, said. “Thanks to the newly developed techniques even Sudan could still have an offspring.”

Scientists in the US hope to use frozen tissues from dead northern white rhinos once housed at San Diego Zoo — as well as from recently deceased animals like Sudan — to develop embryos.

“The really long-term aim — I speak about 50 years now — would be to have a self-sustaining population in its original habitat,” Stejskal said.

Although Sudan never sired a male calf, he did produce two females. One of them, Najin, is still alive — and with his daughter, Fatu, they are the last two northern white rhinos on Earth.