I’m sure most of us have seen one or two of those Jurassic Park films, with reanimated T-Rexes and Velociraptors giving it large in modern day America. All rather fanciful stuff of course.

However, over the last 8 or 9 years scientists have been trying to turn fiction into fact by attempting to inject fossilised DNA that is less than 700,000 years old to be at all valid into a “closely related living species”. But that’s only the start of the jigsaw puzzle which also includes gene tranters, genome matching, cloning, surrogate birthing and parenting, to name but a few hurdles in the reanimation of an extinct species.

A biotech company called Colossal Biosciences, want to bring back the Dodo, and have almost $200m to spend on the project. Now I’m not going to bore you with all the technical bollocks. Just read the link if you’re interested. However, even though there are advocates in supporting de-extinction across a wide range of recently extinct animals, critics suggest it is a pointless exercise and that resources should be focused on saving endangered species from hunting, deforestation and perhaps even good old climate change.

Critics also feel that if scientists are successful in reanimating extinct animals it will mean the mass slaughter of all animals that maybe of some value either in terms of food or monetary value, knowing full well that scientists can simply “reanimate” them and repeat the process.

A slightly more concerning issue is a moral one and that is do we have the right playing God in terms of genetics, cloning and reanimating not only extinct animals but perhaps even dead people if their DNA remains are still accessible. And with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we could have the capabilities of bringing the dead back to life for good intentions or bad.

The idea of seeing dinosaurs roaming down the street will probably never ever happen given that their DNA is well over the 700,000 year validity threshold – by some 60 odd million years in fact. But what about a reanimated woolly mammoth, or a Pyrenean ibex or the good old Dodo? Or even more extreme, a reanimated Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein or a Osama bin Laden?

The concept of de-extinction should remain as dead as a Dodo. End of!

all that’s interesting

scientific American

Nominated by Technocunt.