the notion of bringing vanished species back to life
some call it De-extinction has hovered at the boundary between reality and science
fiction for more than two decades most of us remember the fantasy created by
the original Jurassic Park where scientists found the DNA of dinosaurs
and use that to resurrect prehistoric monsters this story captured the
imagination of millions and there's quite a bit of truth to the idea however
the science of de-extinction still lags far behind the fantasies so far we have
only been able to bring back one extinct species in 2003 a team of Spanish and
French scientists set out to bring back the perennial ivic settle when texts
inked when a falling tree crushed the last one in 1999 scientists were able to
preserve its cells then injected nuclei from those cells into goat eggs emptied
of their own DNA then implanted the eggs into surrogate mothers after 57
implantation only seven animals became pregnant and
of those seven pregnancies six ended in miscarriages but one mother carried a
clone to term sadly the clone had a large growth in its lungs and it
suffocated ten minutes after it was born so the perineum i've extinct for a total
of ten minutes now over 15 years later the science of cloning has become
mainstream you can clone your dog for a cool hundred thousand dollars something
that many celebrities do we are getting closer and closer to re-engineering lost
species like the mammoth with new gene editing techniques instead of cloning we
can directly edit DNA like editing the code of a website to give us whatever
traits we desire everything has a genetic sequence and editing the
sequence changes the physical characteristics
gene-editing is so precise that scientists are able to control every
trait down to tusk length fur color and ear size so potentially we could edit
the DNA of a chicken to create a genetically modified t-rex chicken
hybrid we know we have the technology to bring some of these species back from
extinction so the real question is should we
imagine a future where saber-toothed Tigers giant sloths and woolly rhinos
roam the plains again and wouldn't it be ethical to bring back all of those
species that went extinct at the hands of mankind like the Chinese river
dolphin or the Tasmanian tiger while it is fun to fantasize about reviving lost
species there is one question that must be answered before pursuing this
experiment why why bring back these species is it for our own personal
entertainment is it to reverse some sort of guilt we feel or is it to repair the
Earth's damaged ecosystems the most logical argument in favor of
de-extinction is to bring back biodiversity to ecosystems that humans
have disrupted a hundred thousand years ago the rate of extinction was around
one species every month today 100 to 200 species of plant insect bird and mammal
become extinct every 24 hours we are currently experiencing the sixth mass
extinction event in Earth's history and it's happening 80% faster than it's ever
happened before if you go into an environment and take out all the apex
predators the prey explodes the grass gets eaten down and everything collapses
in nature changes occur over hundreds of generations but humans are causing
dramatic changes more rapidly than nature can adapt using de-extinction to
repair ecosystems could be like replacing a missing piece of a puzzle
this would mean bringing back recently extinct species only species that have
died off in the last hundred years or so in an effort to restore nature's balance
so it wouldn't make sense to bring back a saber-toothed tiger or a Megalodon but
it might be worthwhile to bring back the passenger pigeon or dodo humans are
creating voids in the ecosystem and de extinct ting species might be the key
and refilling those voids although we have yet to bring back an extinct
species we have solid evidence that ecosystems are fixable a great example
of ecosystem repair is what happened on the Channel Islands off of the coast of
California in the 1800s settlers brought pigs to the island the pig population
exploded and destroyed the habitat of the native Fox which was the top
predator on the island then during World War two the United States polluted its
oceans producing chemicals for war these chemicals contaminated the fish
and eventually killed off the native bald eagles that preyed on the fish once
the bald eagles were gone smaller golden eagles invaded the Channel Islands to
hunt the pigs and foxes by 1990 there were only 12 foxes left conservationists
had to step in first by cleaning the oceans then by getting rid of the pigs
and Golden Eagles then reintroducing bald eagles to keep the golden eagles
away so finally the Fox population can return today the native plants and
animals are once again thriving on the Channel Islands without these
conservation efforts the island would have been reduced to a barren wasteland
we have an infamous example of this with the legend of Easter Island where the
ruin of a remote paradise caused the entire human population to self-destruct
and to total extinction if we don't intervene in the current pattern of
habitat destruction we could become like the inhabitants of Easter Island
fighting over the last remaining resources until we all disappear
de-extinction maybe one of the ways we can reverse this downward trend but it
will take careful research to ensure we are adding the right pieces to the
puzzle the last thing we want is to bring back a species just to watch it go
extinct again in any case we are still a long ways away from seeing a wild herd
of woolly mammoths but the question of why must be answered now if you like the
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