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Life

Long-frozen male mice father offspring

16 August 2006

MEN reluctant to father a child in this lifetime may like to consider giving cryopreservation a try. Baby mice have been produced using sperm from animals that had been dead for 15 years, a research team is claiming.

The technique could potentially be used to bring back extinct species, such as woolly mammoths, that have been preserved in permafrost, by injecting their sperm into oocytes obtained from females of closely related species.

Atsuo Ogura of the RIKEN Bioresource Center in Tsukuba, Japan, kept the dead male mice in temperatures below -20 °C before thawing them in water at room temperature (…

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