For the same reasons we protect endangered species.To preserve biodiveristy and genetic diversity.To undo harm that humans have caused in the past.To restore diminished ecosystems.To advance the science of preventing extinctions.
Revive & Restore, with the support of TED and in partnership with National Geographic Society, convened this day-long conference Friday, March 15, 2013 to showcase the prospects of bringing extinct species back to life, along with a discussion of ethical issues.
The first project to revive an extinct animal using its museum-specimen DNA starts here. Once it succeeds, the techniques will be applicable to hundreds of other extinct species.
The passenger pigeon was selected for its iconic status and its relative practicality. Its DNA has already been sequenced. Some of its fans among scientists have the technical capability to begin the miracle of resurrection. The work will proceed by stages over the coming months.
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For the same reasons we protect endangered species.To preserve biodiveristy and genetic diversity.To undo harm that humans have caused in the past.To restore diminished ecosystems.To advance the science of preventing extinctions.
It is likely to make them care more. The costs and difficulty (maybe impossibility) are vastly greater for reversing extinction than for heading it off. Preventing extinction is hard enough; reversing extinction will be prohibitively expensive and maddeningly slow. In most cases, once a species is gone, it will stay gone. First protect the living.
Signs are there will be some impressive milestones in this decade. Technically one extinction has already been partially reversed. The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000. A Spanish team used frozen tissue to clone a living twin in 2003, birthed by a goat. The baby ibex died of respiratory failure after ten minutes (a common problem in early cloning efforts). Funding dried up, so no further work has been done on this species as yet. As George Church reminds people, the first airplane flight in 1903 lasted 12 seconds.
There are at least three semi-successful techniques for de-extinction so far. 1) Selective back-breeding of existing descendents to recreate a primordial ancestor is being used for the revival of the European Aurochs, among others. 2) Cloning with cells from cryopreserved tissue of a recently extinct animal can generate viable eggs. If the eggs are implanted in a closely related surrogate mother, some pregnancies produce living offspring of the extinct species. 3) Allele replacement for precisely hybridizing a living species with an extinct species is the new genome-editing technique developed by George Church. If the technique proves successful (such as with the passenger pigeon), it might be applied to the many other extinct species that have left their “ancient DNA” in museum specimens and fossils up to 200,000 years old.
That remains to be seen. It is one reason to do the research: is the genome the species? The answer will vary from species to species. De-extincted plants should flourish as if they’d never left, if suitable pollinators are still around. But if California condors had gone extinct, it’s unclear if they could be brought back fully, because the young rely on parental training. Passenger pigeons got no significant parental training, but can new ones function without a flock? Could young mammoths be reared successfully by a herd of their close relatives, Asian elephants? Once something is returned to the wild, how much does the wild teach it? Even with exponential advances in modern technology, de-extinction projects will not produce species that are 100% genetically identical to the extinct species, due to the constraints of working with incomplete ancient DNA. It is expected that the revived species will be nearly identical genetically, and “functionally identical” ecologically. They should be able to take up their old ecological role in their old habitat. Revived woolly mammoths, for example, should be able to convert parts of the northern boreal forest and tundra into “mammoth steppe” grasslands, as they once did.
De-extinction is not a “quick fix” science. Most species revival projects will take many decades. First, extensive research about a candidate species is conducted before moving into a lab setting for genomic work to revive the species. Then, once the initial revival is completed, the species will be bred in captivity, preferably with genetic variability introduced from the genomes of a range of specimens or fossils. The growing population will be studied and then eventually moved to quarantine areas for further observation and analysis. Getting the okay from regulatory agencies will be required before the creatures are ultimately re-introduced to the wild.
Passenger pigeons, for example, will initially be bred in captivity by zoos, then placed into netted woods, and then finally re-introduced to portions of their original habitat—America’s eastern deciduous forest. Before that happens, The US Fish and Wildlife Service and regulatory agencies in the relevant states will have to agree to welcome the resurgent birds.
It was a wonderful movie, which introduced the world to the idea of de-extinction back in 1993. Its science fiction is quite different from current reality, though. First, no dinosuars—sorry! No recoverable DNA has been found in dinosaur fossils (nor in amber-encased mosquitoes). Robert Lanza observes, “You can’t clone from stone.”
Second, the plot of the movie is driven by protecting the commercial secrecy of an island theme park. Real-world de-extinction is being conducted with total transparency. Eventual rewilding of revived species can be no more commercial than the current worldwide protection of endangered species and wildlands.
Revive & Restore itself is a nonprofit project within a 501(c)(3) public charity, The Long Now Foundation, which “fosters long-term responsibility.”
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