My rendering of the arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, reportedly revived by Russian scientists from 32000-year-old tissue frozen in Siberia
They look like jasmines with attitude. What they actually are are the arctic flower that are in bloom on the narrow-leafed campion revived by a team of Russian scientists from tissue frozen for 32,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.
There are certain news stories that you know would score globally. The regeneration of this particular variety of the campion, supposed to have been dead for 320 centuries is one such story. I can see wire service editors going, “This is a global hit.” It has been published across the world. And the way the flower looks has surely contributed to it wide use.
Most flowers are pretty because that’s their purpose. Their purpose is to lure as part of the cycle of pollination. But some flowers take it to a new height, like jasmines or the one here. If you were not told about this flower’s antiquity, you would never have guessed.
Since I have no access to the actual picture provided by Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who led the regeneration experiment, I have drawn it from the photograph.
Resurrection of extinct flora and fauna using well preserved tissue has been in the realm of scientific possibility for sometime now. That the dinosaur or the wooly mammoth may walk the earth again has for long been a matter of human fascination.
Claims of such regeneration do not have a happy history since many of them have turned out to have been later discredited. In this particular case though, we may be on much stronger ground because of the improved radiocarbon dating technology.
As if the story of a flower reblossoming after 32000 years is not terrific enough, it has an equally compelling back story. The plant has been revived from the fruit of the flower apparently burrowed away by a squirrel in a fantasy reminiscent of ‘The Ice Age’ movies.
The claim by Yashina and her team is being viewed with considerable skepticism by some fellow scientists who think that it is extremely hard to germinate seeds of much recent antiquity and under more favorable conditions.
While scientists go about determining whether this is indeed the discovery it promises to be, those of us who just hover around on the periphery of science can delude ourselves for a while.
