Will our science fiction future
include the prehistoric past?
We're all familiar with the story of Jurassic
Park.
The eccentric billionaire pays a bunch of
scientists to genetically resurrect dinosaurs
for his amusement park and hilarity ensues.
So, how realistic is this scenario?
Well, for dinosaurs, the sad answer is not
very realistic, because DNA degrades over
time.
Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.
So being able to sequence the genome of a
dinosaur looks to be impossible.
Even with the mosquito in amber scenario.
But the same is not necessarily true for animals
that went extinct more recently, like in the
last ten thousand years or so.
In fact, it's not just a hypothesis, scientists
are working on it right now.
Back in 2003, a team of scientists attempted
to clone a bucardo, which is an extinct animal
that's similar to a goat.
They harvested nuclei out of bucardo cells,
and then they put that into empty goat egg
cells and then into goat surrogate mothers.
After several attempts, they had a live bucardo
delivered by c-section.
Sadly, it only lived a few minutes.
But it laid the ground work for the future.
And since then, techniques and technologies
have improved and scientists are now on the
verge of being able to bring back several
extinct species.
And they don't necessarily need a viable cell
to do it.
Another approach is create a chimera, which
is an animal that, on the outside, resembles
one species, and on the inside resembles another.
This is how scientists plan to bring back
the passenger pigeon.
They're going to reconstruct passenger pigeon
DNA, and inject it into band-tailed pigeon
eggs.
Now the hatchlings are going to look like
band-tailed pigeons.
They're going to act like band-tailed pigeons.
But they're going to have the reproductive
cells of passenger pigeons.
So if you breed two of these altered band-tailed
pigeons together...
BAM!
You've got passenger pigeons!
Now the question is - is this a good idea?
I would love to see flocks of passenger pigeons
flying around, or even a woolly mammoth walking
by.
How cool would that be?
But some people are a little worried that
this de-extinction technology could lead to
less importance placed on conservation.
Why should we spend money and effort conserving
a species, if we can just bring them back
from the dead, should they go extinct?
Now using this same sort of flawed logic you
could see people decide to exploit the environment
even more than we already are.
And another drawback is that some extinct
species may not be able to survive in today's
ecosystems.
And it hardly seems fair to bring a species
back from the dead, just for it to go extinct
again.
But this doesn't mean de-extinction technology
is a bad idea.
It's actually an amazing idea!
For one thing, it can help us bring endangered
species back from the brink of extinction
by increasing biodiversity in these small
populations.
And who knows, maybe the reason why traffic
is so bad in the morning is because the woolly
mammoth crossing is particularly busy today.
Now that leads me to a question for all of
you this week.
If you could bring one species back from extinction,
which one would it be and why?
Let us know in the comments below.
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