So You’re Extinct? Scientists Have Gleam in Eye
by Gina Kolata
Until recently, the arrow of natural selection seemed to go only one way. A species could form, then it could flourish, then it could go extinct. And once it was extinct, it could not come back.
Now, though, some scientists say they see a new path.
Maybe we can no longer delay death, but we can reverse it, said George Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist.
For now, only one extinct subspecies has been brought back, and the baby animal that was born lived just minutes in 2003. It was a Pyrenean ibex, a large goatlike creature that prowled the cliffs in the Pyrenees between Spain and France until the last one died in 1999. The method used was cloning using frozen cells of the last of the animals to try to create a new one, much like Dolly the sheep was cloned from a frozen udder cell of a sheep that had died years before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/science/earth/research-to-bring-back-extinct-frog-points-to-new-path-and-quandaries.html?pagewanted=all