Seize the day!

Resurrecting the extinct

res·ur·rect          부활시키다, 되살리다, 파내다 [rèzərékt]

Through this process, they were able to resurrect all different types of dinosaurs

res·ur·rec·tion       (죽은 사람의) 되살아남, 부활.

They view the policy as a resurrection of 'individual university admission exam'

ex·tinct            [종족·가계·생물 등이] 멸종한, 사멸한 an extinct animal

ex·tinc·tion          (종족·생물의) 절멸, 멸종

im·ag·ine           상상하다 / …을 꾀하다 / 생각하다

gi·ant              엄청나게 큰, 거대한

stuff               ① 재료 ② 물건 ③ 물질 

leg·end            전설, 구전(口傳); (현대의) 전설적 인물; [불] 민간 전승

mam·moth         [고대 생물] 매머드: 플라이스토세(世)의 거대한 코끼리.

mas·to·dont       ＝mastodon 마스토돈:제3기 중기의 구치에 유두(乳頭)상 돌기가 있는 장비목(長鼻目)의 포유 동물.

ground sloth      **나무늘보  gigantic extinct terrestrial sloth-like mammal

of the Pliocene and Pleistocene in America

sáber-toothed cát    (고생대의) 검치호(劍齒虎): 화석(化石) 동물.
spe·cies [spíːʃiːz]     [생물] 종(種) (생물 분류의 기본 단위 cf. FAMILY

van·ish      [보이던 것이] [특히 갑자기 시야에서] 사라지다, 보이지 않게 되다 [from ‥]

 [지금까지 존재하던 것이] (어느덧, 수수께끼같이) 없어지다, 소실되다;

vanish from[out of] sight -cf. DISAPPEAR

part·ly             부분적으로, 일부분은; 어느 정도는, 얼마간은, 다소는

ex·pan·sion        [불] 확장, 확대, 증대, 팽창, 신장, 발전, 전개; 상술(詳述), 증보

re·port             […을] 알리다, 보고하다; report＋doing […이라고] 알리다,

re·mark·a·ble        […의 점에서] 범상치 않은, 예외적인, 진기한[for, about ‥]

주목할 만한, 눈에 띄는 (conspicuous), 현저한(striking)

ad·vance             […의] 진보, 향상, 발달[of, in, on ‥]; 승진, 승급, 출세

pos·si·bil·i·ty         […의] 가능성, 실현성, 가망[of, for ‥, that절]

daz·zle                   [강렬한 빛이] …의 눈을 어지럽게 / 부시게 하다 [-의 훌륭함·아름다움 등이] …의 판단을 흐리게/란 시키다, 압도 …을 감탄하게 하다, 현혹시키다

- The lights of the car dazzled me. / He dazzled her with his talk of a luxurious future

wool·ly             털(모양의 것)이 있는; [식물] 부드러운 털에 덮인.

im·ag·i·na·tion      상상, 공상; 상상력, (특히 문학상) 창조[창작]력, 창의; 천재 cf. FANCY [유의어]

rè-creátion            ① 개조 ② 재현 ③ 개조물  / (오락·놀이 등에 의한) 레크리에이션, 기분 전환

fílm·màker       영화 제작자, 영화 회사

DNA             [생화학] ＝deoxyribonucleic acid.

crea·ture         생명이 있는 것, 생물; 동물, 축생; (주로 미) 가축, (소)말

ul·ti·mate·ly       최후로, 마침내, 결국      = finally , in the end , at last , at long last

He thought seriously of quitting, but ultimately decided to stay on.

se·quence        [불] 연속 [잇달아] 일어나기; (연속적 일어나는) 순서, 차례

the sequence of events / in chronological sequence / in sequence

se·quenc·ing      (격식) (연속하는 것의) 배열, 순서.

-       Sequencing clearly is an associative operation, here equivalent to function composition

-       Genetic sequencing of healthy and infected samples allowed scientists to isolate and compare the bacteria, viruses and fungi present in honeybees

ge·net·ic         [생물] 유전(학)의; 유전 인자의[에 의한] / 발생[기원]의, 발생론적인.

blúe·prìnt        청사진; (비유) 상세한 계획[윤곽] / [생물] (유기 생명체의) 청사진.

a blueprint for the new plan

/ make[draw up] a blueprint for the future

code            ① 법전 ② 암호, 기호 (체계), 약호 (체계); (암호의) 문자, 단어, 숫자 ③ 부호 

re·cent·ly        요즈음, 최근에, 조금 전; 새로이

ma·chine        기계; 기계 장치(※작고 단순한 것은 instrument)      

 - the economic machine

(사회·생물체의 복잡한) 기구(機構), 기관         

- Man is a consuming machine

lab·o·ra·to·ry    실험실, 연구,시험소; (약품 등의) 제조소; 사진 현상소; 감식, 과학 수사 연구소

[lǽbərətɔ̀ːri]     - When he got back, there was a strange mold on some of his lab cultures.

mag·ic          마법, 마술, 주술

an·cient           옛날의, 태곳적부터의; 고래(古來)의, 아주 오래된

[éinʃənt]           1. ancient 오랜 옛날에 있었던 또는 시작된. 2. antiquated 구식이라 쓸모없게 된 ◇ antiquated system 구식이 된 제도. 3. antique 오래되어 진기한 ◇ antique chair 옛날 의자. 4. old-fashioned 시대에 뒤진, 구태의연한, 유행에 뒤진

break onto the scene 갑자기 나타나다, 튀어나오다, 혜성처럼 등장하다

-       Hirst broke onto the art scene in 1990 with "A Thousand Years," perhaps his most controversial work.  / Alexander is now concentrating her efforts on breaking onto the scene in America.

har·vest         수확하다, (농작물을) 거둬들이다; …을 채취하다; [목재 등을] 벌채하다

fos·sil              화석(성)의, 화석화한 / 발굴된

mo·lec·u·lar       분자의[에 의한, 로 된], 분자 사이에 존재하는

field                분야, 활동 범위, 영역  - It's outside my field

prog·ress          진행, 진전, 진척 (상태)

stag·ger·ing       비틀거리는 / 깜짝 놀라게 하는, 멍하게 하는; [수량이] 엄청난

-       Imagine receiving a cell phone bill which is staggering

dis·cov·er·y        발견, […이라는] 발견[that절]

hair shaft         모간: 털의, 피부 표면에 노출되어 있는 부분, 모근(毛根)이 아닌 부분

-       Biotin transports fatty acids to the hair to ensure that the follicles and hair shaft are well nourished and moisturized.

shaft               ① 자루 ② 수갱 ③ 화살 

seal                           ＋[목]＋[전치사]＋[명사] …을 […에] 넣고 봉하다, 봉인하다 [in ‥]

plas·tic            플라스틱의 / 플라스틱 / 조형의 / 크레디트[신용] 카드

pro·tect·ing       보호하는

rich                (양적으로) 풍부한, 많은, 충분한

plen·ti·ful         풍부한, 넉넉한, 충분한 / 풍부하게 생기는

source             ① 원천 ② 근원 ③ 출처                                 cf. sauce [sɔːs]

pos·si·bly          ① 아마, …인지도 모르는, 혹시 ② 아무리 해도 ③ 어쩌면

es·pe·cial·ly       특히, 각별히; 두드러지게(markedly); 보통 이상으로

pre·serve          [사람·물건을] [위험·부패 등으로부터] 보호[보존, 보관]하다[from ‥]

pros·pect          (또는 a prospect) [불] […의] 예상, 예기, 기대[of ‥](※expectation보다 약함)
[prάspekt ]        ① 전망 ② 기대 ③ 가망 - in prospect of a good harvest

fo·ren·sic          범죄 과학의, 과학적 범죄 조사의; 법의학적인 / ① 법정의 ② 변론의 ③ 토론의

-       In fact, the process often relies on forensic evidence and eye witness accounts to verify if events really did take place

ma·te·ri·al         재료; 원료; (물건의) 구성 요소, 성분, 소재

prom·is·ing       전도유망한, 가망 있는, 기대할 수 있는 (hopeful)

dust·y              ① 먼지투성이의 ② 먼지를 뒤집어쓴 먼지가 자욱한 ③ 칙칙한, 잿빛이도는

spec·i·men        견본, 실례 cf. EXAMPLE/ (생물학상의) 표본, 시료, 시험품

tuck                …을 [좁은/안전한 곳에] 치워두다, 쑤셔[비틀어, 밀어] 넣다, 감추다[up, away]

 (보통 수동태) [건물을] 남의 눈에 띄지 않는 곳에 짓다[away]

tucked             걷어[집어] 넣은, 집어넣고 꿰맨; (구어·방언) 가두어넣은, 좁다란

tréasure tròve    매장물: 소유자 불명의 매장 보화 / 귀중한 발견(물) / (지식·예술품 등의) 보고

-       This is a bit misleading though, because the site is a real treasure trove

Trove              ① 귀중한 수집품 ② 귀중한 발견 ③ 발견물 = treasure trove

clump             [사람·물건의] 집단, […의] 덩어리[of ‥] / […의] 숲, 덤불, 풀숲[of ‥]

frag·ment         (물건의) 파편, 조각; 단편

ge·nome          [유전학]생물의 생활 기능 유지를 위한 최소한의 유전자군을 함유하는 염색체의 한 세트.

de·code            [암호 등을] 번역[해독]하다(↔encode);

génetic engineering       유전자 공학. = gene-splicing , recombinant DNA technology

dif·fer              […과; …간에] 다르다[from ‥; between ‥]; al·ter               …을 바꾸다, 고치다; …을 […로] 바꾸다[into ‥]

 (alter부분적/ change전면적 변경)

Cf. al·tar ① 제단 ② 성찬대 ③ 제단자리

clon·ing           미수정란의 핵을 체세포 핵으로 바꾸어 유전적 동일 체를 얻는 기술/ 복제하는

ad·van·tage       ① 이점 ② 유리한 점 ③ 이익 

per·ma·frost        (북극 지방의) 영구 동토층.

[pə́ːrməfrɔ̀st]     - According to Field, a major problem caused by global warming is the melting of the arctic permafrost.   /   The permafrost also contains methane, which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide

con·ven·ient·ly      ① 편리하게 ② 마침, 형편이 좋게도 ③ 형편 좋게 

fro·zen               ① 동결된 ② 냉담한 ③ 추위로 언

tis·sue               [생물] 조직

in·tact                (서술적) 손상되지 않은, 온전한, 원래대로의

/ 변하지 않은; 영향을 받지 않은

 / [몸이] 완전[건전]한; 젊고 싱싱한; 처녀의

-       It was buried in sand and rocks that helped keep the skeleton intact. / There is also no metal strong or light enough in order to stay intact in space.

trans·fer             ① 갈아타다 ② 옮기다 ③ 전근

nu·cle·us            [생물] 핵, 세포핵                                                               [njúːklias]

cell                   [생물] 세포; (동식물 조직 내의) 작은 공동(空洞)

egg                  [생물] 난자(卵子)(ovum, egg cell).

súrrogate mother  대리모: 다른 부부를 위하여 자궁을 빌려주고 아기를 낳는 여성

sur·ro·gate          대리(인), 대행자; (일반적으로) […의] 대용물[for, of ‥]; 대리모

[sə́ːrəgèit]      - The United States already tolerates markets for blood, semen, human eggs, and surrogate wombs.     /     Professional brokers are advertising, giving infertile couple the possibility of having a surrogate-born child

-       Surrogate mothers are usually young, healthy females who are able to conceive.  /  The embryo was then implanted into a surrogate mother cow.   /  The transgenic embryos were then implanted in the uterus of seven surrogate mother marmosets.

interspecies          [생물] (이)종 사이의, 이종간의

= in·ter·spe·cif·ic     [생물] (이)종 사이의, 이종간의

-       Zanjani's sheep is the latest contribution to the controversial field of interspecies cloning.       /        In interspecific hybridisations, however, the inheritance of plastids appears to be more erratic.

im·plant           vt. [의학] [장기·피부 등을] 이식하다; [인공 장기 등을] 끼워넣다.

vi. [생물] [배(胚)·수정란이] (자궁에) 착상하다.

pay a visit to ..  [사람·물건을] 찾아가다, 들르다(※뚜렷한 목적으로 잠깐 방문시) seem               […에게] (…처럼) 보이다, 생각되다, (…)인 듯하다[to ‥]

Ser·en·get·I        [sèrəngéti] 탄자니아 북서부의 초원;

야생동물 보호구(Serengeti Natl. Park) 포함.

fa·cil·i·ty           (보통 -ties) 설비, 시설, 기관; 편의, 편익, 편

in·sti·tute          [ínstətjùːt] 학회, 협회, 연구 기관; 그 건물, 회관

qui·et·ly            조용히, 말없이, 가만히 / 평온하게 / 얌전하게

preg·nan·cy       임신; 임신 기간.,= maternity

ges·ta·tion        임신; 잉태 기간; (병의) 잠복기(gestation period). = maternity

[dʒestéiʃən]       - A typical human gestation is nine months.  /  The different gestation periods are one of the important variations between mammals

e·mer·gen·cy      긴급[비상] 사태, 돌발 사건, 긴급한 경우; 응급 환자 접수처[병실]

wíld·lìfe           (집합적) 야생 생물(야수·야금·야생 식물 등)

en·dan·gered     위험에 빠진; [동식물이] 절멸 위기에 처한 ( <-> non-endangered)

rel·a·tive           동류(同類), 동족 ① 친척 ② 상대적인 ③ 관계가 있는

lap·a·ro·scope     [lǽpərəskòup] [의학] 복강경(腹腔鏡).       

lap·a·ros·co·py    [lӕpərάskəpi] 복강경 검사법; 복강경 수술.

 *lap·a·ro- (연결형) 「배」 「옆구리」

 *-scope「…보는 기계」 「…경」 「…검사기」

laparoscopically 복강경 검사로

or·di·nar·y         보통의, 통상의, 일상적인(customary); 평범한(commonplace) hóuse càt         집고양이, 기르는 고양이

lit·er·al·ly          글자 뜻대로, 엄밀한 의미로, 과장 없이, 정확[충실]히flu·o·resce         형광 현상을 나타내다, 형광을 발하다

[flùərés]            - When excited by a specific wavelength of light, the protein will fluoresce

Fluorescing       형광을 발하는

flu·o·res·cer        형광제(螢光劑), 형광료(螢光料).

pro·ce·dure       [일 처리의] 순서, 절차, 방법, 방식[for‥]; (순서로서 낱낱) 행위, 과정de·pos·it          …을 [어떤 장소에] (특히 주의 깊고 정확하게) 놓다, 내리다gath·er            …을 끌어 모으다[together, in, up]; 하나하나 줍다

/주워 모으다; 정보를 수집하다

do·mes·tic        가정의, 세대의, 가족의

/ [동물 등이] 사람에게 길들여진, 가정에서 사육하는

e·lec·tri·cal        전기의[에 의한]; 뇌성(雷聲)이 울려 퍼지는

pulse              [전기] 펄스: 전압·전류 등의 순간적인 변동.

em·bry·o           씨눈, 배(胚); (보통 임신 8주까지의) 태아. cf. FETUS.

term               임신 기간; 출산 예정일; 해산, 분만

                      - be close to term 출산 예정일이 임박한

 / a term baby 달이 차서 태어난 아기

wíld·càt            살쾡이, (집고양이가 야생화한) 들고양이

óff·sprìng         (사람·동물의) 자식; 자손; (짐승의) 새끼

mate               동료가 되다; 결혼하다; [동물이] 짝을 이루다.

al·to·geth·er       전적으로(wholly), 아주, 완전히; (부분 부정) 전혀(…인 것은 아니다)

                     - That's a different matter altogether. / He is not altogether a fool.

(종종 문미에 쓰여) 전체적으로, 전부 합해서

- a debt of 5 dollars altogether.

/ There were only five persons present altogether.

al-together        「전부 합해서」 「완전히」 

all together       「한꺼번에」 「모두 같이」의 뜻

- put one's books all together in a box 상자 하나에 책 전부 넣다

lit·ter              (동물의) 한배의 새끼 - a litter of pigs /  쓰레기 / (환자,부상용) 들것 / 옛날 가마 

de·vel·op          [사람·사물 등이] 발달하다, 발전하다, 성장하다, 자라서 …이 되다

rè·pro·dúce       [생물] …을 생식[번식]시키다

nat·u·ral·ly        ① 당연히 ② 자연스럽게 ③ 물론 

tool                연장 구실을 하는 것, 수단(means)

car·a·cal           [동물] 카라칼: 남서 아시아·중동산의 스라소니. = desert lynx , Lynx caracal

lynx                [동물] 스라소니; 캐나다스라소니; 스라소니의 모피.

e·land              [동물] 일런드: 아프리카산의 대형 영양.

an·te·lope         [동물]영양; [불] 그 가죽. / (미) 가지뿔영양: 북미 서부산.

cous·in            동류(同類), 같은 계통의 것; 등가물(等價物) / 사촌, 종형제, 종자매

bon·go            [동물] 봉고: 열대 아프리카의 영양.

re·mark            (소견으로) […라고] 한마디하다, 촌평하다, 간단히 쓰다; 말하다

(※직접 화법)

re·mark·a·bly     (형용사부사와 함께) 눈에 띄게, 뚜렷하게, 현저하게, 유별나게; 대단히

nerv·ous         ① 신경 과민의 ② 신경의 ③ 신경질의

 (nervous 현재 일, anxious 곧 일어날 일)

mas·ter         [기예·기술 등을] 숙달하다, 터득하다, 마스터하다

keep·er            (英) (귀중품·공공물 등의) 관리[보관]자; 박물[미술, 도서]관장

 ① 지키는 사람 ② 사육자 ③ 감시원 

rep·re·sent        ① …을 나타내다 ② 대표하다 ③ …을 표현하다 ④ 상징하다

store               …을 […에 대비하여] 비축[축적, 저장]하다

can·is·ter          (습기가 차지 않게 차·커피·담배 등을 넣는) 작은 깡통[상자].

liquid nitrogen  액화 질소

rhino               코뿔소 =rhinoceros

vi·a·ble            [태아가] 살아갈 수 있는; [생리·식물] 생육할 수 있는,  생존 가능한 / 실행가능한

[váiəbl]             - He found a viable solution to the problem

Noah's Ark       노아의 방주

ab·so·lute·ly       ① 완전히 ② 절대적으로 ③ 무조건으로 

threat·ened       위협당한 / [야생 동식물이] 절멸의 위기에 직면한, 절멸할지도 모를. [θrétənd]

in·spire            ① 영감을 주다 ② 고무하다 ③ 고무하여 마음이 내키게 하다

in·vest             [시간·정력 등을] […에] 쓰다, 쏟다[in ‥]

①투자하다 ②부여하다 ③…에 갖춰지다 

post·er          ① 포스터 ② 벽보 ③ 포스터를 붙이다 

- During the 1970s and 1980s, hedgehogs(고슴도치) were one of the poster animals for environment activists through Europe

ef·fort             ① 노력 ② 수고 ③ 분투

con·scious         ① 자각하고 있는 ② 의식이 있는 ③ 의식하고 있는 

con·sult            ① 상의, 상담하다 ② 의견을 묻다 ③ 고려에 넣다, 염두에 두다

rein·deer          순록(馴鹿).

herd·er            (소·양 등을) 지키는 사람, 목동, 지키는 사람

pre·vi·ous·ly       미리, 전에 - three weeks previously / I had met her previously

ón·gòing          (보통 한정적) 계속하고 있는, 진행 중인(developing)

 Resurrecting the extinct

It's difficult to imagine that 10,000 years ago, right here in North America, there lived giant animals that are now the stuff of legends - mammoths and mastodons, ground sloths and saber-tooth cats. They, and thousands of other species, have vanished from the Earth. Today, partly due to the expansion of one species - ours - animals are going extinct faster than ever before.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7379646n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.13

The very definition of extinct means forever, but what if that didn't have to be? As Lesley Stahl reported in early 2010, scientists are making remarkable advances that are bringing us closer than ever before to the possibility of a true animal resurrection.

Who wouldn't be dazzled by an animal like the woolly mammoth, or the sabretooth tiger, the Irish elk or the giant sloth? Today they exist just as bones in museums, alive only in our imaginations and the recreations of artists and filmmakers. But what if that could change?

In the age of DNA, we now know that these vanished creatures, like all life on Earth, are ultimately nothing more than sequences of the four letters - A, C, T, and G - that make up the genetic blueprint or code of life. The codes for extinct animals were thought to have died along with them, until recently, when machines like one at the Smithsonian's DNA lab started working magic.

"Just the study of ancient DNA only broke onto the scene 20 years ago or so. The idea that we could harvest DNA from extinct creatures, from fossil bones, learn something about the past," Sean Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin, told Stahl.

Carroll says that like so many things in the field of DNA, the progress has been staggering.

One surprising discovery has been the value of ancient hair. Scientists recently discovered that the hair shaft seals DNA inside it like a biological plastic, protecting it, and making hair a rich and plentiful source of genetic information.

"Does that mean that you can take extinct animals, I mean, there's hair in museums? ...And get the genetic sequencing?" Stahl asked.

"Possibly, and especially if those animals were preserved in any way, there's a good prospect of that. It's sort of like 'CSI,' you know? How good is this forensic material? Can you get good DNA information from older and older and older material? That's pretty promising," Carroll replied.

Dusty old specimens that have been tucked away in the drawers of natural history museums like the Smithsonian are suddenly potential treasure troves of genetic information: just a couple of years ago, using only a few clumps of wooly mammoth hair, scientists at Penn State were able to extract enough DNA fragments to figure out most of its genetic sequence, making the woolly mammoth the first extinct animal to have its genome decoded - which raises the question of whether resurrecting one of these creatures is really possible.

Scientists say one option would be genetic engineering: take a living animal that's related to the mammoth, like the elephant, figure out all the places where its DNA differs from the mammoth's, and then alter the elephant's DNA to make it match.

That's not possible just yet, but there may be another way: cloning.

"Is it possible that we're gonna get the full DNA of the woolly mammoth and be able to clone it?" Stahl asked.

"Yes, I think we'll be able to get much, if not all, of the woolly mammoth DNA. And the great advantage there is that a lot of the specimens are in permafrost. So they're sorta been conveniently frozen for us, which preserves DNA, preserves tissue better," Carroll said.

But for cloning, just knowing the DNA sequence from hair isn't enough. You'd need an intact mammoth cell, which Carroll says will be difficult to find, but not impossible.

"It could be a skin cell. It could be any particular cell that hopefully has been preserved well enough, stayed frozen for thousands of years and to transfer the nucleus of that cell into, for example an egg of an elephant," Carroll explained.

He told Stahl that the two species are "close enough" that maybe the elephant could serve as a surrogate mother.

It's called interspecies cloning: implanting DNA from one species into the eggs of another.

Anyone who wants to try it, with a mammoth or anything else, would be well-served to pay a visit to Dr. Betsy Dresser in New Orleans.

Tucked away on 1,200 acres of land that seem part Serengeti, part high-tech medical facility, she and her staff at the Audubon Nature Institute have been working quietly for years on the science and the art of interspecies cloning, and she'll be the first to tell you that, even with living animals, it isn't easy.

"You don't just clone some cells and then all of a sudden you have a baby. I mean, there's so many scientific steps along the way, knowing everything from hormones to the proper surrogate to, you know, length of pregnancy," she explained. "Because, see, we don't know how long a woolly mammoth, the gestation period. We can guess, but we don't know, really."

But Dr. Dresser's work on interspecies cloning is focused on the future, not the past. Rather than trying to resurrect extinct creatures, her goal is to keep the animals we have today from going extinct tomorrow.

"I feel like we're in the emergency room of the wildlife business, really," she told Stahl. "I don't want to see elephants in textbooks or, you know, the way we see dinosaurs. We're going to lose a lot of species if we don't do somethin' about it."

Dresser and her team are trying to increase the populations of endangered animals by putting their DNA into the eggs of their non-endangered relatives.

On the day we visited, they were laparoscopically removing eggs from an ordinary housecat, then sending the eggs down the hall to have the housecat DNA literally sucked out of them.

"What she's doing is she's removing the DNA from this domestic cat egg. And she can see it by what we call fluorescing it," Dresser explained, while observing the procedure with Stahl. "It becomes just very blue, and so now she knows where it is. And now you'll see her go in there and be able to remove it."

Once the housecat DNA is deposited outside of the egg, they will replace it with the DNA of an endangered Arabian sandcat, a completely different species, gathered from a tiny piece of skin.

"And there you see it being inserted into the domestic cat egg," Dresser explained.

"And you made that from just skin?" Stahl asked.

"Just from skin cells, right," Dresser said.

An electrical pulse starts the egg dividing, and if all goes as planned, the now sandcat embryo will be put back into the domestic cat to grow to term.

It has worked before -- with African wildcats; the research has resulted in some interspecies offspring. These interspecies clones were so normal that they even mated the old-fashioned way and produced kittens.

"Eight kittens altogether. We had a couple litters," Dresser told Stahl. "Totally African wildcats, totally healthy. And it said to us, 'Hey this works.' And now that we know we can do it, we can say to the world, 'These animals do develop. They do reproduce naturally.' And we can use this as a tool for endangered species."

Extra: The Tasmanian Tiger

And Dresser is working her way up. Her next interspecies cloning project will use the non-endangered caracal cat as a surrogate mother for an endangered lynx; and after that, the Eland antelope as a surrogate for its endangered cousin, the bongo.

"You know, there are still people who get nervous at the idea of cloning. They think there's something wrong about it," Stahl remarked.

"I'll tell you what, if you have to choose cloning or extinction, I'm gonna choose cloning. But I wanna be darn sure that I know how to do it. And if we don't do it while we have the animals now to be able to learn how to do it, then we're not gonna have a choice. It's not gonna be an option," Dresser said.

So to keep her options open while she's mastering interspecies cloning, she's also putting as many animals as she can on ice, literally.

Dresser is the keeper of a new kind of zoo - a frozen zoo - where she's collecting tiny skin samples from thousands of different animals, representing hundreds of species, and is storing them at 343 degrees below zero in tiny canisters inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen.

"We've got lions and tigers, we've got gorillas and rhinos. We've got little frogs. All of the animals...that people know in zoos," she explained.

Extra: Frozen Zoo

Asked how long a piece of skin can be viable, Dresser said, "We think these cells can sit here for hundreds, maybe thousands of years."

"So, if any one of these animals were to go extinct, you could bring them back?" Stahl asked.

"In theory, I believe we can," Dresser said.

And she agreed that her frozen zoo is kind of Noah's Ark.

"Do you think we're at the stage where we should be taking every single wild animal, even if they're not endangered, and putting them in a frozen zoo?" Stahl asked.

"Yes. I absolutely do," Dresser said. "What have we got to lose? I think we should put every species in that we can, while we have the opportunity."

Which raises the question: with so many living animals today threatened, why think about resurrecting extinct ones, like the mammoth?

"To bring the woolly mammoth back, we don't have enough space for the big animals we already have," Stahl told Sean Carroll.

"These projects, like the woolly mammoth, they inspire people to think about the meaning of what we're doing here. And why would you invest years and years of your life in trying to bring back a woolly mammoth or taking care of them if you did," he replied.

"That's an excellent question," Stahl said.

"I think it would fire up people's imaginations. And I think somewhere there's a 9-year-old girl watching this program and listening to this saying, 'That's what I wanna do. I wanna bring back these creatures that are extinct. Or I wanna protect creatures that are now threatened from going extinct.' So in many ways, I think the woolly mammoth can sort of be a poster animal for a general effort of being more conscious of our activities on the planet," Carroll explained.

No one has yet found the intact cell it would take to resurrect that poster animal, but in Siberia, four years ago, a reindeer herder discovered a remarkably well-preserved one month old baby mammoth that had lain frozen in permafrost for 40,000 years.

Its DNA was in better shape than any previously found, raising hopes that between new finds and new technology, it may just be a matter of time.

Betsy Dresser stepped down as director of the Audubon Nature Institute recently to work on a book about endangered species and new technology. She continues to consult on the center's work, which is ongoing.

No one knows what causes lifelong face blindness. It was discovered so recently, scientists are just beginning to unravel its secrets. And some of the clues are coming from people who once had normal face recognition, but lost it after suffering damage to part of the brain. And in an interesting twist, those people are also offering insight into the way the rest of us recognize faces. Imagine waking up after a trauma and not being able to recognize the people closest to you -- that's what happened to Colleen Castaldo.

Lesley Stahl: Up until the fall of 2009, did you have any trouble recognizing faces at all?

Colleen Castaldo: No, not at all.

Lesley Stahl: Just like everybody else?

Colleen Castaldo: Like everybody else, yeah.

That all changed late one night when Colleen had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. Her doctors found a brain tumor and did surgery to remove it, but as she recovered, she started noticing that something wasn't right.

Colleen Castaldo: The nurses. I thought that I was meeting them each for the first time. And then, I would, you know, listen to them and think, I don't know, they were acting like they knew me already.

Lesley Stahl: Oh, disorienting.

She figured it was the medication, until her close friend Doreen came to visit wearing white, and Colleen assumed she was part of the medical staff.

Colleen Castaldo: I looked at her, I smiled and I turned back to my husband and started to talk to him, and he stood up and said, "Doreen." And I looked and thought, "Doreen?" And then, it hit me. I knew right then and there, this is the problem I had been having, that I--

Lesley Stahl: Faces.

Colleen Castaldo: I just-- yeah, faces.

Now even faces she knew well before...

Colleen Castaldo: [George Clooney] No.

Lesley Stahl: OK, well that's George Clooney.

Colleen Castaldo: Oh, wow. No, I wouldn't know that.

...are a mystery to her.

Colleen Castaldo: No, I don't know who that is. Who is it?

Lesley Stahl: The president.

Brad Duchaine showed me an MRI scan of Colleen's brain.

Lesley Stahl: Is that a hole in her brain?

Brad Duchaine: That's right. It's in the right temporal lobe.

Lesley Stahl: So back here.

Brad Duchaine That's right.

And the location of that hole where the tumor had been was a clue. If removing that area caused the loss of face recognition, could that be where all our brains process faces? It turns out that neuroscientists have been trying to figure out how it is that our brains recognize faces for decades.

Nancy Kanwisher: Face recognition is a very difficult problem, because all faces are basically the same.

MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher...

Nancy Kanwisher: There are these two roundish things here. There's this thing there. There's this thing there. They're all the same. And so discriminating one face from another is a very computationally difficult thing, because it's those subtle differences in the same basic structure that distinguish one thing from another.

And it is exactly those subtle differences face blind people like Jo Livingston miss.

Jo Livingston: I could describe anything I can put into words. Eye color, general overall shape, whether your ears stick out. But those things would bring it down perhaps from the population of the world to a few million.

So she could say this person has dark eyes, high cheekbones, an oval face, which would allow Jo to distinguish her from this person, but this face and this face? Impossible.

Jo Livingston: I can say what I can see. But I cannot say the micro-measurements that are what tell a normal person that it's you and not somebody of the same specification.

But how is it that the rest of us can perceive these two people as distinct individuals despite the similarities? An important clue comes from what we can't distinguish: as we saw earlier, faces upside down. Like these two Duchaine showed me, which look very similar.

Brad Duchaine: Maybe you don't even see that there's any difference.

Lesley Stahl: I see something different in the lower lip.

Brad Duchaine: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: Eyes are a little different.

Brad Duchaine: But then, if I show them to you upright, so here's the one that you saw on the left there. Looks perfectly normal. And then--

Lesley Stahl: Oh!

Brad Duchaine: Here's the one you saw on the right, you saw upside-down.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my goodness.

The eyes and mouth in the photo on the right had been turned upside-down.

Brad Duchaine: And now the face looks really grotesque.

Lesley Stahl: Wow.

Brad Duchaine: But--

Lesley Stahl: But upside-down--

Brad Duchaine: Upside-down it's really hard to see that.

Nancy Kanwisher: If you look at a face upside-down, you're very bad at recognizing it. If you look at a word or an object or a scene, you can recognize it fine upside-down.

Lesley Stahl: So what did that tell you?

Nancy Kanwisher: It tells you that there's something very special about face recognition. It works in a very different way from recognition of everything else.

And that got Kanwisher wondering if there might be a part of the brain responsible just for seeing faces. She started putting people with normal face recognition into MRI scanners and watching what happens in their brains as they look at different images.

Lesley Stahl: This is what she's seeing?

Nancy Kanwisher: Yeah. This is what she's seeing.

Lesley Stahl: She's seeing faces.

Nancy Kanwisher: Exactly. And now she's seeing objects because we want to know not just what parts of the brain are active when you see faces, but what parts are more active when you see faces than when you see objects.

Kanwisher discovered that there was indeed a place in the brain that becomes very active when we look at faces.

Nancy Kanwisher: In every subject, boom, there was this nice, big response there. It was very exciting.

And it was right in the same area where Colleen's tumor had been. It's called the fusiform face area. So could that be what's missing in people with lifelong face blindness, like Jacob Hodes? Kanwisher put him in the scanner to find out.

Nancy Kanwisher: I really did not expect to see a fusiform face area.

Lesley Stahl: So you thought there'd be nothing there. Like as if instead of having a bullet go through it, he was just born without it.

Nancy Kanwisher: That's right. That's right.

Lesley Stahl: And?

Nancy Kanwisher: And we looked at the data and his face area was beautiful. It's textbook.

She scanned Jo, Ben and Meg as well, and they had fusiform face areas too.

Lesley Stahl: So what does that say to you?

Nancy Kanwisher: It tells us that the problem is not that this thing doesn't exist. There it is. But see, that's the fun of science. It's fun to be told you're just completely and totally wrong because now you have to go back and, you know, think anew.

And one thing she and other researchers are thinking about is a phenomenon as mystifying as face blindness -- its polar opposite - super-recognizers like Jennifer Jarett, who say they recognize almost every face they have ever seen.

Lesley Stahl: Waiters?

Jennifer Jarett: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Salespeople?

Jennifer Jarett: Yes. Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Oh, like, of course.

Jennifer Jarett: Yes, absolutely. Yes. I'll be walking down the street and I'll see someone, and I'll think, "Oh retail." And then I'll remember, "Oh OK. That person works at-- as-- whatever store and that's where I s-- or they used to work at that store 10 years ago." And then I remember.

Lesley Stahl: 10 years ago?

Jennifer Jarett: Yes, yes.

Lesley Stahl: So they're-- it doesn't matter how far back you saw these people?

Jennifer Jarett: Yes, yes.

Lesley Stahl: So as long as you look at a person and take notice, they're in there?

Jennifer Jarett: I don't even know how to get rid of people.

Only a handful of super-recognizers have been discovered so far, and Duchaine and his colleagues had to come up with a whole new way to test them.

Brad Duchaine: So here are three faces here, which you're familiar with.

Lesley Stahl: I am?

It's called the "before they were famous test" because super-recognizers can also recognize faces as they change through time.

Brad Duchaine: Does that help at all?

Lesley Stahl: You sure I know that person?

Brad Duchaine: That's Dick Cheney.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my god. That's Dick Cheney?

He told me the top right was Richard Gere, and the bottom, Nancy Pelosi.

Lesley Stahl: Wow. Those three people have changed dramatically.

He even gave me a hint with this one: he's now an actor.

Lesley Stahl: And I'm supposed to know this actor?

Clearly, I was not a super-recognizer.

Brad Duchaine: That's George Clooney.

Lesley Stahl: Man. And these super-recognizers just know this?

Brad Duchaine: The supers are really good at recognizing these faces.

Jennifer Jarett: George Clooney.

Lesley Stahl: How could you tell that was George Clooney?

Jennifer Jarett: It just looked like George Clooney to me.

Jennifer Jarett: Oh, Prince Charles. Oh, Madonna. Michael Jordan.

Jennifer Jarett: Oh that's Kato Kaelin.

Lesley Stahl: The O.J. Simpson trial.

Lesley Stahl: Wow, you are good.

But we thought we had finally stumped her with this one. She said she only had a guess.

Jennifer Jarett: If I were to guess I would say Mike Wallace.

Lesley Stahl: That is Mike Wallace.

She recognized Mike Wallace as a 6-year-old!

Lesley Stahl: I don't even understand how you do that. I can't fathom it.

Jennifer Jarett: As people age I guess the aging process somehow in my brain just seems very sort of superficial. And, you know, as if someone gets a haircut you can still recognize them. It's still the same face to me. It's just the adult version.

So why is 60 years like a haircut to her, while face blind people can't recognize someone they just saw? A team of scientists at Harvard has begun scanning the brains of super-recognizers too, to see if they might yield any clues. The science of facial recognition is in its infancy. But new discoveries can't come fast enough for one last person we'd like you to meet --13-year-old Tim McDonough from Boston, who is severely face blind.

Lesley Stahl: Can you describe what it feels like when someone comes up? You know you're supposed to know who they are--

Tim McDonough: I usually just say, you know, "Hi, nice to see ya."

Lesley Stahl: So you sometimes pretend?

Tim McDonough: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: You fake it?

Tim McDonough: I fake it, yeah.

[Researcher: So you think it's not your mom?

Tim McDonough: Yeah.

Researcher: OK, so that actually was your mom.]

Tim is working with the Harvard team to see if they can help him learn to recognize his mother's face. It's part of a pilot program to see if face blindness might someday be treatable. So far, it's not.

Tim McDonough: I just hope that nobody tries to talk to me because, if they do, they--

Lesley Stahl: They want to talk about something you've done with them, or something.

Tim McDonough: Yeah. And I don't know who they are.

Lesley Stahl: So it must be really hard to make friends.

Tim McDonough: It is, yeah. Takes me a while to make friends.

It turns out making friends can be tricky at both ends of the face recognition spectrum. Super-recognizers can seem like stalkers.

Jennifer Jarett: I would see someone, you know, weeks or months later at a party and people would say, "Oh, do you know each other?" And I'd say, "Yes." And the other person would say, "No." And I'd say, "No, don't you remember the first week of classes? You were walking to English class with someone..." And people would look at me really strangely and sort of uncomfortably, I think, a lot.

Jennifer says she's now learned to take her cues from others, ironically, just as face blind people do...

Jacob Hodes: I'll play this eye contact game where I'll wait. I'm not gonna really look at you, but I'll wait to see if you look at me. And then, "Oh, you look at me. Oh, look-- oh, hi."

Lesley Stahl: So you're always waiting for a cue from them?

Jacob Hodes: Yeah. So I'll hang back a little bit, which I don't wanna do.

Lesley Stahl: In any social situation, are you always a little anxious?

Oliver Sacks: I'm more than a little anxious. And I tend to keep my mouth closed before I make some awful blunder. Of course, another tactic, or strategy, is to smile at everybody.

That's what Chuck Close told us he does.

Chuck Close: You have to be really charming. If you are going to insult them by not remembering them, you just have to be extremely charming so that people don't hold this stuff against you.

Lesley Stahl: Do you feel now that you're missing out on something?

Ben Dubrovsky: Oh yeah.

Meg Novotny: Yeah.

Ben Dubrovsky: Definitely. I notice a loss.

Ben Dubrovsky: I understand someone by an abstraction. I put together a set of information that to me means mother or means Lesley.

Lesley Stahl: But it's not a visualization of a face.

Ben Dubrovsky: And the question, the thing that I wonder next, you know, is how does it affect even things like love?

Lesley Stahl: How does it?

Ben Dubrovsky: When people talk about love they say, "I carry the person with me. I carry their image with me." I don't carry their image. Does that mean I experience it differently? And how would I ever know? I don't know.

Jacob Hodes: There's a long tail of stuff that happens that you're missing. Connections you're not making.

Lesley Stahl: Still?

Jacob Hodes: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meg Novotny: At least now we understand why.

Jacob Hodes: Yeah, right.

Meg Novotny: And it's therapeutic, but it doesn't fix it.

stranger.docx

4. Face Blindness-1: When everyone is a stranger

(CBS News) Imagine going to school to pick up your child and not being certain which kid is yours. Imagine brushing your teeth every morning and not wholly recognizing the face in the mirror. All of this is unimaginable for most of us, but a basic fact of life for people with the mysterious neurological condition called "face blindness" -- or prosopagnosia - which can make it almost impossible to recognize faces, even of one's nearest and dearest. Dr. Oliver Sacks knows something about the condition, and not only because he's a neurologist, but also because Dr. Sacks himself is face blind. Lesley Stahl reports.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7402685n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.8

Most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. It's so automatic, it almost sounds silly to even say it. Friends can put on a hat, cut their hair, and still we know them by their face. We can do this for thousands upon thousands of faces without ever giving it a moment's thought. But imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldn't, if your wife or husband looked like a stranger; you couldn't tell your kids apart; couldn't recognize yourself in a mirror. Well that's what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, that can make it nearly impossible to recognize or identify faces.

If you've never heard of face blindness, you're not alone -- chances are your doctor hasn't either. It's been unknown to most of the medical world until very recently. Hearing about it can feel a little like entering the twilight zone. But for people who are face blind, the condition is very real.

For more information on face blindness -- and to take a test -- click here

To visit Dr. Oliver Sack's website, click here

Jacob Hodes is one of them. He's 31 years old, he has a college degree, has had great jobs, and he seems perfectly normal -- just don't ask him to identify any faces.

Lesley Stahl: We're going to put up the first one, even very famous ones.

Jacob Hodes: [Picture of John Travolta] No idea.

We showed Jacob faces without hair, a pure test of facial recognition.

Jacob Hodes: [Will Smith] No.

Clearly Jacob could see my face, but he says if we happened to run into each other in a few days, he wouldn't know me from any other woman with short blonde hair.

Brad Duchaine: They meet somebody, they have a good time with them, they have a nice relationship. Then, a week later, they walk past them.

Brad Duchaine is a professor at Dartmouth College who has been studying face blindness for nearly 15 years. He says the hardest thing to understand is how people can see a familiar face but not recognize it. So he created a demonstration to give me a little taste. Faces turned upside down.

Brad Duchaine: So here are some famous faces. You're gonna be tempted to twist your head, but don't do it.

Lesley Stahl: OK.

Brad Duchaine: You know, can you--

Lesley Stahl: Boy, that is hard.

Brad Duchaine: Can you identify any of these people?

I was completely at a loss.

Lesley Stahl: You think I'd know all of these people?

Brad Duchaine: You've seen them all a lot.

Lesley Stahl: I don't know any of these people. I really don't.

Brad Duchaine: You wanna see 'em upright?

Lesley Stahl: Sure.

It was astonishing. With just that click, they became recognizable people before my eyes.

Lesley Stahl: I know John Travolta. I know Morley.

And there was Denzel Washington, Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock. But the one that really got me was the young woman on the lower right, my daughter.

Lesley Stahl: I didn't know my own daughter?

Brad Duchaine: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: I didn't know my own daughter. Wow.

Lesley Stahl: So is this-- am I getting a feeling for what people with face blindness have?

Brad Duchaine: This is, when you look at that, there's clearl-- there's a face there.

Lesley Stahl: Oh yeah.

Brad Duchaine: There are parts. There are eyes. There's mouth. But you just can't put it together.

Lesley Stahl: Wow. That's stunning. I feel terrible for them now.

Brad Duchaine: Yeah. It's really difficult.

And largely unknown. Prosopagnosia only got its name in the 1940s, when a couple of soldiers came back from World War II with head injuries and couldn't recognize their wife or parents. And it took another 50 years for science to discover that people could be born face blind, like Jacob Hodes and Jo Livingston, a retired teacher, Ben Dubrovsky, a software products designer, and Meg Novotny, a doctor.

Lesley Stahl: If I were your patient, we-- you'd spent a long time with me discussing a problem. I come back the next time.

Meg Novotny: Oh, no, no, no. You walk out to the window at the front and start checking out and I walk out of the room and I don't know who you are.

Lesley Stahl: Come on.

She relies on patient charts, she told us but there aren't any of those in Ben's office where lunch in the cafeteria can be tricky.

Ben Dubrovsky: I was sitting down at lunch having a discussion with someone about one of my projects and the guy across the table gets up from lunch and says, "God, that's really interesting. When you have that meeting can you invite me? Thanks. See ya." Who is it? I don't know.

Lesley Stahl: Who is it?

Ben Dubrovsky: I have no idea.

Lesley Stahl: Is it a memory issue?

Jacob Hodes: Not only.

Jo Livingston: The memory is never created.

Lesley Stahl: The face doesn't get put--

Jo Livingston: It doesn't get filed.

So they have to rely on other strategies to identify people: hair, body shape, the way people walk, their voice, even style of dress. But Jacob told us it can all fall apart when someone changes their hair, like a colleague named Sylvia who he couldn't find one day until she started putting her hair into her usual ponytail.

Jacob Hodes: And she like put it into the ponytail. And once it was in place that was Sylvia. It clicked. Then she took her hair back out of that ponytail.

Lesley Stahl: Right then and there?

Jacob Hodes: Yep. She just put it in and then took it out and--

Lesley Stahl: So she went from Sylvia, not Sylvia, Sylvia, not Sylvia?

Jacob Hodes: She disappeared.

Lesley Stahl: Come on.

Jacob Hodes: Yeah.

To him it was as though her face had changed into someone else's before his eyes.

Jacob Hodes: So now I'm confronted with this situation that got weird. Because I knew this person was Sylvia, but it didn't feel like Sylvia.

Faces mean so much to us: identity, beauty, character, a place to hang all our memories about a person. Faces have captivated artists forever, so it may surprise you to learn that the man who painted these faces, renowned portraitist Chuck Close is also face blind, and severely so.

Lesley Stahl: Let's say you went out to have dinner with somebody and then you saw her the next day--

Chuck Close: Wouldn't remember her.

And yet he has spent his career -- even after a collapsed spinal artery left him mostly paralyzed -- painting, well...

Lesley Stahl: Faces. Chuck Close has face blindness and he paints faces.

Chuck Close: The reason I think I was driven to it was to take images of people that matter to me and commit them to memory in the best way I can, which is to slow the whole process down, break it down into lots of little memorable pieces.

Which is exactly how he creates these works. He can't make sense of a whole face, so he works from a photograph with a grid on it, and translates what he sees -- square by square -- onto his canvas.

Lesley Stahl: Well, guess what we've done?

Chuck Close: I don't know.

Lesley Stahl: We put together a quiz for you.

We brought some of our famous faces along to show him...

Chuck Close: From the chin, I think it's-- um, Leno.

...and were surprised that he did pretty darn well.

Chuck Close: Well, from the lips, I think it's Tiger Woods.

Lesley Stahl: Yeah, well you're pretty good.

But of course not perfect...

Chuck Close: I don't have a clue.

Lesley Stahl: That's Tom Cruise.

Chuck Close: Right now, my guts are tied in knots because this very activity is the thing that makes me most nervous. Oh, now I have to figure out who this person is...

Because he isn't recognizing these faces the way most of us do. Every face is a puzzle he has to solve.

Chuck Close: What I'm thinking? You don't see too many people with just a mustache anymore, so that means it's probably somebody who's not alive. So if it's an African American of a certain age with a mustache, it might be Martin Luther King.

Lesley Stahl: You're amazing. You deduce, deduce, deduce. You're like Sherlock Holmes here.

Chuck Close: Yeah, this is how I get through life.

Of course he knew we were showing him famous faces. With our group, we threw in a trick one, a photo of Jo's daughter.

Lesley Stahl: Does anybody know who that is? Jo?

Jo Livingston: No.

Lesley Stahl: Jo, work on it, because it's somebody that Jo knows.

Jo Livingston: Well, it may be but nothing's coming.

Lesley Stahl: It's someone in your family.

But still she didn't get it...

Lesley Stahl: It's your daughter. Now can you see it? Is it clear now?

Jo Livingston: It is believable now.

We were baffled that a condition so extreme it could keep people from recognizing their own children could have been almost completely unknown until very recently. We asked Dr. Oliver Sacks, the famous chronicler of fascinating and bizarre neurological conditions, who wrote about face blindness in his latest book, "The Mind's Eye."

[Oliver Sacks: It is with our faces that we face the world...]

Lesley Stahl: How do you explain that the medical world did not identify this problem?

Oliver Sacks: It is not usually a complaint of people. People do not bring it up. Many people who are color blind, do not know of it until they take an army medical. One sort of assumes that other people are the way one is.

Ben Dubrovsky: It never, ever, ever in my life occurred to me that people would look at a face and just get it like that.

Jo Livingston: I believed that I was not good with people but I had no idea of the reason. I just thought I was stupid.

Jo only learned there was such a thing as face blindness when she stumbled across this article, and came in to be tested in Duchaine's lab. A few hours after her second visit, in a bizarre coincidence, she and Duchaine ended up attending the same event.

Brad Duchaine: I kept placing my face in a position where she could see it.

Jo Livingston: I realized that one of the group was staring at me in a way that people don't normally.

Brad Duchaine: And so finally at one point I said, "Do you know who I am?"

Jo Livingston: "Ah."

Brad Duchaine: And she put it all together.

Duchaine had seen face blindness in action; Jo had seen the missed connections of her life.

Jo Livingston: If that had been anybody else, they would have been presumably furious, would not have spoken to me and would have probably never have spoken to me again. But I would never have known they were there.

Lesley Stahl: Yeah.

Jo Livingston: It made me realize, "How many times have I done this?"

Lesley Stahl: Right. How many friends have you offended? How many people aren't talking to you and you don't know why?

Jo Livingston: And we'll never know.

Oliver Sacks: People do think you may be snubbing them or stupid, or mad, or inattentive. That's why it's so important to recognize what one has. And to admit it.

Which is exactly what Sacks himself has just done -- written about the fact that he too is face blind.

[Oliver Sacks: I have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as I can remember. My problem extends not only to my nearest and dearest, but also to myself. ]

Oliver Sacks: I've sometimes had the experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing it's a mirror.

Lesley Stahl: No.

Oliver Sacks: I have indeed.

Lesley Stahl: No. Because you didn't know it was you?

Oliver Sacks: I could see that it was a large, clumsy man with a beard. Now, I've now found a way of dealing with this. I have one special feature. I have rather large ears. If the large, clumsy man with a beard has extra large ears, it's probably me.

Lesley Stahl: I shouldn't be smiling, but it's funny.

Oliver Sacks: Well, it is. I mean, these things are both comic and serious.

And, surprisingly common. Recent studies show as many as 1 in 50 people may be face blind. And the search is on for clues inside their brains. We'll show you what the research is finding, plus, would you believe, super-recognizers...

Jennifer Jarett: I would say Mike Wallace.

Lesley Stahl: That is Mike Wallace!

...who never forget a face...

Jennifer Jarett: I don't even know how to get rid of people.

...when we come back.

3. Deception at Duke: Fraud in cancer care?

Chemotherapy can be a tough road for people with cancer, often debilitating and even dangerous. Which is why five years ago, when Duke University announced that it had an advanced, experimental treatment that would match chemotherapy to a patient's own genetic makeup, it was hailed as the holy grail of cancer care. The scientist behind the discovery was Dr. Anil Potti, and soon Dr. Potti became the face of the future of cancer treatment at Duke, offering patients a better chance even with advanced disease. However, when other scientists set out to verify the results, they found many problems and errors. What our 60 Minutes investigation reveals is that Duke's so-called breakthrough treatment wasn't just a failure -- it may end up being one of the biggest medical research frauds ever.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7398476n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.9

Five years ago, Duke University announced it had found the holy grail of cancer research. They'd discovered how to match a patient's tumor to the best chemotherapy drug. It was a breakthrough because every person's DNA is unique, so every tumor is different. A drug that kills a tumor in one person, for example, might not work in another. The research was published in the most prestigious medical journals. And more than a hundred desperately ill people invested their last hopes in Duke's innovation.

In 2010, we learned that the new method was a failure. But what isn't widely known, until tonight, is that the discovery wasn't just a failure, it may end up being one of the biggest medical research frauds ever - one that deceived dying patients, the best medical journals and a great university.

[Dr. Anil Potti: Duke has made a commitment to fight this war against cancer at a much higher level.]

Dr. Anil Potti, featured in this commercial for Duke University, had made a discovery that promised to change the face of medicine.

[Potti: And that's the goal, is to...is to be able to tell a patient with cancer that I'm not just a cancer doctor, I'm here to treat your particular cancer.]

Dr. Potti made the breakthrough in the renowned lab of Dr. Joseph Nevins. The Nevins Lab had built a reputation for important work. Dr. Nevins saw something in Dr. Potti and he chose the young researcher to mentor and support.

Nevins: Very bright, very smart individual, very capable. He was a very close colleague to many, many people.

Pelley: And to you.

Nevins: And to me.

When Dr. Potti decoded the genetic makeup of hundreds of tumors, the research created huge computer files of data. That data was the underlying proof in research papers under the names of Potti and Nevins that were a sensation in the top medical journals.

Kevin Coombes: It was going to change medicine. It was gonna change how we treat patients.

Doctors everywhere were eager to save lives with the new discovery. At MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Kevin Coombes and Keith Baggerly began analyzing Dr. Potti's data to verify his results.

Pelley: And as you dug into the data, what did you find?

Keith Baggerly: We started some basic processing, and we noticed some things that were really odd that we just couldn't explain.

Coombes and Baggerly are experts in the kind of data created in Dr. Potti's research. They emailed their questions to Duke and Dr. Potti admitted a few clerical errors, but he said that new work confirmed his results. Duke moved ahead. Drs. Nevins and Potti applied for patents and started a company to market the process. They and Duke stood to make a fortune. Patients enrolled in the clinical trial so that their tumors could be surgically biopsied to be matched with the best drug. But at MD Anderson, during months of analysis, Baggerly and Coombes kept finding errors that they thought were alarming.

Baggerly: One of the things that was especially disturbing was that these types of errors happened again and again and again. That was far beyond anything that we'd seen.

They suspected Dr. Potti had somehow reversed some of the data and that some of the patients could be getting, not the best drug for their tumor, but the worst.

Coombes: Then you would be giving patients drugs that would definitely not benefit them. So there's clear, potential for harm there.

Pelley: Exactly the opposite of what this was supposed to be.

Baggerly: So-- yes. So we wrote them and we said, "This-- this-- this is a big problem."

Baggerly and Coombes eventually concluded that Duke's holy grail was worthless. But Drs. Nevins and Potti disagreed.

Pelley: I wonder why, at that point, you didn't say, as the director of the lab, "Look, stop. Too many questions. We have to get to the bottom of this." And put a team together to figure that out.

Nevins: I didn't feel it ever got to that point. I felt that we had addressed the issues that had been raised.

But that changed when researchers here at the National Cancer Institute said they too were having trouble with the data. Duke suspended the enrollment of patients and asked an outside review committee to analyze Dr. Potti's discovery. After three months, the review committee concluded that Dr. Potti was right.

Baggerly: My immediate reaction was an expletive, which I will not repeat here.

Coombes: We'd gone through the usual channels. We'd written letters to journals. We'd written the article. We'd succeeded in getting the trial suspended, and somebody investigated it. We'd done everything we could.

Duke restarted the clinical trials. And that's when Juliet and Walter Jacobs sat down for their first meeting with Dr. Potti.

[Walter Jacobs, audio recording: I'm recording this with your permission.

Potti: Absolutely. That's a good thing 'cause you're gonna miss a lot.]

The Jacobs were told, based on the research, that the chances of finding the right drug were approximately 80 percent. Walter Jacobs says no one mentioned that the clinical trial had been suspended because of so many questions.

[Potti: I will help you. Trust me.]

Many trusted because Dr. Potti's work had been vindicated. But there was just one more thing - discovered, not by a scientist, but by Paul Goldberg, the editor of a small independent newsletter called "The Cancer Letter." Goldberg got a tip from a confidential source: check Dr. Potti's Rhodes scholarship. It was right there on his applications for federal grants. Trouble was it wasn't true.

Pelley: You asked him about it?

Nevins: Certainly I asked him about it.

Pelley: What did he say?

Nevins: He said that while it wasn't the Rhodes scholar as we know the Rhodes scholar, it was a fellowship from Australia from a group of Rhodes scholars in Australia. So, a stretch of the truth.

Pelley: Was that the moment when you realized?

Nevins: Amazingly, I was still hanging on to the notion of "there must be a good explanation here." This was--

Pelley: Why were you deluding yourself at that point in time? What is it that you want to believe?

Nevins: I want to believe that somebody that I had trusted, that was a colleague for the last four, five years, someone that I viewed as a friend, was who I thought they were. And then you're faced with the reality of you've been deceived.

Fearing that reality, Joseph Nevins, whose own reputation was at stake, reviewed the original data which had justified the clinical trials for 112 patients. Dr. Nevins discovered that when the underlying data disproved Dr. Potti's theory, the data were changed.

Nevins: It became clear that there was no explanation other than there was a manipulation. A manipulation of the data, a manipulation of somebody's credentials and a manipulation of a lot of people's trust.

Pelley: Manipulated data? These were not errors?

Nevins: That's correct, it simply couldn't be random. It simply couldn't be inadvertent. It had to have been based on a desire to make something work.

[Potti: Genomics will revolutionize cancer therapy. It actually identifies a fingerprint that's unique to every individual patient.]

Dr. Rob Califf: This is sort of like the holy grail of cancer.

Dr. Rob Califf is Duke's vice chancellor of clinical research.

Scott Pelley: Was the idea here that this would change the way we thought about treating cancer?

Califf: Well, you've never seen such excitement at an institution, and it's understandable.

It wasn't just Duke that was excited. A hundred and twelve patients signed up for the revolutionary therapy. Hope was fading for Juliet Jacobs when she learned about it. She had Stage IV lung cancer. And this would be her last chance.

Walter Jacobs: She was my best friend, but that's kind of cliche. She's, she's somebody who after 49 and a half years, I was still madly in love with.

She and her husband Walter were looking into experimental treatments. They had to choose carefully because there was only time for one.

Scott Pelley: When you met Dr. Potti, what did you think?

Jacobs: We felt that he was going to give us a chance. He was... He was very encouraging.

For a patient with no time, Dr. Potti's research promised the right drug, right now.

Pelley: Fair to say Potti was a rising star at Duke?

Califf: Potti was one of our most important rising stars.

A lot of people were pleased that it was Dr. Potti who made the discovery of a lifetime. Born in India, he was known as an earnest, modest, hardworking Rhodes scholar, who did research at the University of North Dakota before reaching Duke in 2003. He was a young man with a big idea, which he explained in an interview for Duke.

Pelley: Is it a close call? Or is it abundantly clear that the data were fabricated?

Nevins: Abundantly clear.

Pelley: When you switch the data, the theory is proved. If you put the data back the way it's supposed to be, the theory fails.

Dr. Rob Califf: The theory's a dud if you put the data back to where-- the way it was supposed to be.

Pelley: How could that switch happen?

Dr. Rob Califf: If it happened by chance, it would be roughly equivalent to an asteroid hitting the earth.

Duke University agreed to tell us this story as a cautionary tale for other institutions. Vice Chancellor Rob Califf is implementing new procedures for Duke and also overseeing the retraction of Dr. Potti's papers from the medical journals, one of the most significant retractions in medical history. He's examining how both a prestigious university and outside investigators missed all the warning signs.

Pelley: How could they have found nothing wrong, nothing suspicious about the work at that point?

Califf: They were analyzing a data set that had been prepared by Dr. Potti. So, the data set they got was one that produced the same results that had been seen in our own analyses.

Pelley: You know there are people watching this interview who are thinking to themselves, "Look, they stood to be wealthy. The university stood to make a lot of money. No one wanted to believe that this research was corrupt." To what extent was that the reason that the warning signs were overlooked?

Califf: In my view, it was not the money that was the primary driver, it was this great opportunity to help people that was driving people to say, you know, we've got to make this work because it looks so good.

Pelley: The patients were told that there was an 80 percent chance that precisely the right drug for their tumor would be found. That wasn't true. Do you bear any responsibility for that?

Nevins: I regret that some of the issues that were raised along the way I didn't recognize earlier, and that this could have been brought to a halt at an earlier time.

Juliet Jacobs died three months after she entered the clinical trial. Walter Jacobs and eight others have filed suit. In his answer to the Jacobs lawsuit, Dr. Potti says he was "not aware that false or 'improper' information had been included in the research." Duke has apologized for the trials. And even though the patients hoped that they were getting an innovation that could save their lives, Duke says no one was really harmed because all of them received the standard of care in chemotherapy.

Jacobs: They did not advertise this as a standard of care program, they advertised this as an advanced clinical trial with great results. For what happened to my wife, I have to blame Potti and anyone else associated with him who knowingly promoted a false counterfeit clinical trial exploiting human beings.

Dr. Potti resigned from Duke. He faces an investigation into research misconduct. He told us, in an email, that it would be inappropriate for him to comment. He wrote, "My primary concern at all times is and will be the care of patients and seeking new ways to treat cancer." These days, he's working as a cancer doctor in South Carolina. And if you look online, you will see that he is celebrated for "his significant contribution to the arena of lung cancer research." The websites were created with the help of an online reputation consultant, perhaps to put the best face on the available data.