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Taking care of the future
Published in Jack Stilgoe, Experiment Earth, 2015
The front cover of the April 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine carried a picture of some animals that had been considered lost forever – a sabre-toothed tiger, a thylacine and a mammoth among others – emerging from a giant test tube (Zimmer 2013). The emerging technology under discussion was the use of reconstructed DNA for ‘de-extinction’. The headline read ‘Reviving extinct species: We can, but should we?’ It is a headline that captures the spirit of, and the trouble with, what Alfred Nordmann has called ‘speculative ethics’ (Nordmann 2007). De-extinction is an idea extrapolated from laboratory techniques in cloning and synthetic biology research. Its popular appeal owes more to Jurassic Park than to any particular scientific breakthroughs. In 2009, researchers attempted to clone a Pyrenean ibex, a species that had become extinct just a few years earlier. An animal was born, via a goat that acted as its surrogate, but it died after just seven minutes because of organ failure, which is common in such clones. This has, so far, been the only animal brought back from extinction. We can conclude that we are some way away from the hyperbolic claim of the National Geographic that this is a technology ‘we can’ use.
Anticipating risks, governance needs, and public perceptions of de-extinction
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2019
Rene X. Valdez, Jennifer Kuzma, Christopher L. Cummings, M. Nils Peterson
Advances in biotechnology may allow for the de-extinction of species. De-extinction is the re-creation of extinct species using methods from synthetic biology, cloning, genetic engineering, reproduction technologies, and stem cell research. Numerous species are currently being considered as candidates for de-extinction, notably the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. De-extinction research on passenger pigeons includes genome sequencing (Hung et al. 2014), with plans to integrate DNA from preserved passenger pigeons into the genome of band-tailed pigeons (Novak 2013). Similarly, research on the woolly mammoth includes genome sequencing (Palkopoulou et al. 2015) with plans to gradually add mammoth genes into Asian elephant embryos, creating hybrids with progressively more mammoth traits (Devlin 2017).