Question

De-extinction

Please write a page's worth! This was one of the main science topics in 2013. It appeared in the papers, on the net, and there was a big conference about it.

And genetics has been pushing forward ever since. This is not simply a breeding program like what is happening with the Quagga Project. This is basically the bringing back to life species that have gone extinct, a la Jurassic Park.

But this is not something that we may be able to do at some distant point in the future. The future is now. A type of wild goat, the Pyrenean ibex, was resurrected (via surrogate goat mother) for 10 minutes before the kid died. A couple of years ago there was an article in the Halifax Herald about Australian scientists working to resurrect a recently extinct species of frog. They managed to get to the stage where the egg was beginning to divide and differentiate.

There are many other examples easily found on the internet. So it is happening even as we discuss it; bald, pasty-skinned, socially inept scientists are fiendishly working away in their laboratories. Right now they are only looking at the recently extinct – a few decades or a century. But there already is talk about bringing back the mammoth or perhaps a saber-tooth tiger. You know it is not going to stop there.

How long before Jurassic Park becomes reality? So the question is:

“Should we bring extinct species back just because we can?”

Some points to think about:

- evolution has already selected against these species (to misquote Jurassic Park)

- humans are the only species that has the ability to deliberately (maliciously?) and methodically cause the extinction of another species.

- if we can’t look after the ones we have now why do we need more

- how long before it becomes commercialized – think Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Sixth Day” Let's hear your view.

Answer 1

De-extinction is also referred to as resurrection biology, where species are revived by either cereation of an organism that is similar to the extinct member or would be resembling the species that is extinct. There are a number of methods by which this is done, few of them being selective breeding and cloning.

1.  if we can’t look after the ones we have now why do we need more

People who oppose de-extinction, state that the amount of efforts and energy that is being put in for resurrection of these species is large. If the same amount of effort was put in to conserve the species that are endangered, that would help in saving those species and they would not become extinct. In order to bring back the extant species, such as the woolly mammoths animals such as the Asian elephants would serve as surrogates. The Asian elephant itself is an endangered species. If it would be used for research for the mammoth, it might in turn be detrimental to the existence of the elephant. If only few species are left, another species might be becoming extinct.

Should we bring extinct species back just because we can

When the species would be resurrected, we would not be able to predict the behavior of these species. These species will not be genetically same to earlier generations and as a result of which, their behavior might become unpredictable. Just because humans have the ability to bring back species would not mean that they should, initially, when the animals lived, they had been raised by their parents. Now when the animals would be brought back, they would be raised by people or humans, which are parents of another species. As s result, the mother techniques would be different, resulting in difference of behaviours. This might be an implication that an unpredictable behavior might unleash some dangers to the normal human community.

Alternatively, some scientist say that if species such as mammoth were brought back, it might reverse the global warming effects. Some of the best reasons would be restoring the ecology. Large species such as mammoth helped in knocking down trees and spreading the grasslands. These were referred to as healthy disturbances that maintained ecology.

Risks are many. One of the most important being the difficult control of the spread of diseases. Controlling these population should be difficult and the expression might not be what we would have expected.