A project to revive long-gone species is a sideshow to the real extinction crisis
“We will get woolly mammoths back.” So vowed environmentalist Stewart Brand at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February in laying out his vision for reviving extinct species. The mammoth isn’t the only vanished creature Brand and other proponents of “de-extinction” want to resurrect. The passenger pigeon, Caribbean monk seal and great auk are among the other candidates—all species that blinked out at least in part because of Homo sapiens. “Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years,” Brand asserted. “We have the ability now—and maybe the moral obligation—to repair some of the damage.”
Just a few years ago such de-extinction was the purview of science fiction. Now it is so near at hand that in March, Brand’s Long Now Foundation, along with TED and the National Geographic Society, convened an entire conference on the topic. Indeed, thanks to recent advances in cloning and the sequencing of ancient DNA, among other feats of biotechnology, researchers may soon be able to re-create any number of species once thought to be gone for good.
That does not mean that they should, however. The idea of bringing back extinct species holds obvious gee-whiz appeal and a respite from a steady stream of grim news. Yet with limited intellectual bandwidth and financial resources to go around, de-extinction threatens to divert attention from the modern biodiversity crisis. According to a 2012 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, some 20,000 species are currently in grave danger of going extinct. Species today are vanishing in such great numbers—many from hunting and habitat destruction—that the trend has been called a sixth mass extinction, an event on par with such die-offs as the one that befell the dinosaurs (and much else) 65 million years ago. A program to restore extinct species poses a risk of selling the public on a false promise that technology alone can solve our ongoing environmental woes—an implicit assurance that if a species goes away, we can snap our fingers and bring it back.
Ironically, the de-extinction conference immediately followed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) meeting in Bangkok, which underscored just how devastating the trade has been. Reports released to coincide with the meeting revealed that between 2002 and 2011, the African forest elephant population declined by 62 percent from poaching; that fishing kills at least 100 million sharks a year—many of them members of imperiled species; and that between 2000 and 2012, an average of 110 tigers a year were killed (as few as 3,200 of the cats remain in the wild). Poachers slaughter 30,000 African elephants every year for their ivory—the highest kill rate since the 1980s. At this rate, the species could disappear in two decades. So could Africa’s rhinos, prized for their horns.
Already conservationists face difficult choices about which species and ecosystems to try to save, since they cannot hope to rescue them all.
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- 2 more endangered ferrets cloned from animal frozen in the 1980s: "Science takes time"on April 18, 2024 at 5:00 am
Two more black-footed ferrets have been cloned from the genes used for the first clone of an endangered species in the U.S ... ranch dog named Shep brought a dead one home in western Wyoming ...
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(Video: Kika Tuff, Revive & Restore) They’re cute, they’re fuzzy — and they may just help bring their entire species back from the brink of extinction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ...
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- What If Extinct Animals Could Be Brought Back to Life?on April 4, 2024 at 5:00 pm
What do saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths and the dodo all have in common? They're all extinct, and some theorize humans played a large part in this. What if we could bring them back?
- 21 U.S. Animals, Plants Declared Extincton October 15, 2023 at 5:00 pm
endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These plants and animals can never be brought back. We absolutely must do everything we can to avert the loss of even more threads ...
- The Tasmanian Tiger Has Been Extinct for 87 Years. It's About to Return From the Dead.on September 25, 2023 at 7:04 am
Scientists hope this technique can be applied to other extinct species that’ve been decimated by humanity’s impact on the natural world. Science could soon bring an animal back from the dead ...
- 9 Species From Hawaiʻi Lost to Extinctionon September 28, 2021 at 5:00 pm
There is no bouncing back from extinction.” The Service has been exceedingly slow to protect species. A 2016 study found that species waited a median of 12 years to receive safeguards. Several of the ...
- Should extinct species be brought back to life?on July 25, 2020 at 9:11 pm
Should we bring extinct species back to life? Sometimes whole species of animals or plants become extinct due to the changes in their habitat, predators or disease. But over the last 500 years ...
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- Can genetically modifying a rare marsupial save it from extinction?on May 7, 2024 at 9:31 pm
Researchers are aiming to make the northern quoll resistant to the toxic cane toads wiping it out in Australia, but little progress has been made ...
- Colossal Biosciences’ Thylacine Gene-Editing Technologies Provide Hope for Australia’s Endangered Northern Quollon May 7, 2024 at 6:00 pm
MELBOURNE, Australia & DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today scientists from Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company, and the University of Melbourne announce a major step forward in ...
- Will microbes bring an end to the plastic disaster? The answer could be an artificial microbe that feasts on plasticon May 6, 2024 at 7:30 pm
Ongoing lab studies were promising enough for Colossal Biosciences to support a Harvard team to work towards developing X-32 to address the plastics crisis.
- What It'll Take to Create 21st-Century Mammoths, Dodos, and Thylacineson April 27, 2024 at 8:16 am
We don’t fully understand how to create an artificial placenta at the moment. We don’t really understand the intricacies of the developmental process. This is all information that we will learn along ...
- Reviving the Past, Safeguarding the Future: Challenges and Innovations in Cell Culture for De-Extinctionon April 19, 2024 at 12:14 pm
In this webinar, our expert speakers will discuss the cell culture aspects of the de-extinction project, from making a large number of precision genome edits in single cells, growing and expanding ...
- The Tasmanian tiger might be extinct but Aussies are determined to find it or bring it backon April 14, 2024 at 4:32 pm
Pask has raised $15 million for a de-extinction project in partnership with American company Colossal Biosciences, which counts Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton and even the C.I.A. among its backers.
- Colossal Biosciences has made headlines as the de-extinction startup primed to bring back the woolly mammoth. Here’s how the business model actually works.on April 11, 2024 at 5:03 am
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- The race to resurrect the dodoon April 10, 2024 at 5:00 pm
The chief scientist behind these “de-extinction” efforts says bringing back lost species can help protect those that are endangered. Get even smarter with the “Make Me Smart” newsletter.
- A Groundbreaking "De-Extinction Project" Aims To Revive The Woolly Mammoth, A Species That's Been Extinct For Over 4,000 Years, Using Stem Cell Reprogrammingon March 26, 2024 at 5:53 pm
Researchers at the company assert that the de-extinction project is not just a scientific breakthrough; the act of reviving a species that has been gone for thousands of years can benefit the ...
- De-extinction: digital lab tech supports a mammoth projecton April 6, 2023 at 3:09 am
“Our goal is to build an end-to-end scientific pipeline for de-extinction,” says Eriona Hysolli, who heads Colossal’s biology division and leads its woolly mammoth project. “People are ...
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