The "A New Northern White Rhino Is On The Cusp Of Life" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Checking out a Time Magazine story about a rhino with a future.  Perhaps you read the story if you subscribe to Time.  Story was about the two loneliest rhinos in the world.  A pair that consisted of a female known as Najin and her daughter, known as Fatu.  They lived in the Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy in Kenya and are the world's last remaining northern white rhinos.  But they may soon have some company.  As I read that last sentence...I wondered how that was gong to ever happen if they were the last two of their kind on earth.  Well, the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin announced this past January that a team of researchers led by Bio-Rescue, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists, has for the first time succeeded in transplanting a rhinoceros embryo fertilized in the lab into the womb of an adult female rhino.  If the methods the researchers used bear out, the northern white rhino could have a second chance at life.  The embryo transfer technique is well established for humans and domesticated animals such as horses and cows, but for rhinos it has been completely unchartered territory.  Seems it took years to get it right, but it is hoped that this technique will work perfectly.  Northern white rhino embryos do exist in labs, but they are a rare commodity.  Since 2019, BioRescue has produced just 30 of them, made of Fatu's harvested eggs and the preserved sperm of four deceased males.  That's to precious a store to risk squandering even one on an experiment that might not succeed.  Instead, the scientists worked with three southern white rhinos, harvesting eggs from a female at a Belgian zoo and sperm from a male at an Austrian zoo.  They

A northern white rhino

then produced an embryo and implanted it into a southern white female named Curra, living at Ol Pejeta.  How they do all this is amazing to me!!  Well, the next step is to wait the 16-month gestation period before Curra would give birth.  But that was not to be.  Just two months later, Curra died, claimed by sudden rainfall and flooding, which unearthed preserved Clostridia bacteria spores, infecting and killing her.  Curra was lost, but the experiment wasn't.  An autopsy found that she had been carrying a viable embryo in her womb.  "It's a miracle, this baby," says Hildebrandt.  He and the BioRescue team are looking forward to more miracles still.  Before the end to the year, they plan to implant Northern white rhino embryos into two southern white rhino surrogates.  "Advanced science," says Hildebrandt, "can help create a population that can be introduced and start reproducing itself."  And, that my friends, is one great story!  I still can't understand how they do all that, but that's OK as long as they know what they are doing.  Anxious to see if everything worked out the way they expect it to.  I'll be looking for the rest of the story in the near future so that I can share it with you.  Hope all goes well!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.