Ethical questions persist over resurrecting planet's lost species

‘De-extinction’ nears reality


Woolly mammoths stomp through the Siberian tundra. The giant moa strides the forest floor of New Zealand. Tasmania’s doglike “tigers” stalk their prey under the cover of night.

This is not a snapshot of times past, nor the next sequel to Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park.”

Instead, it is a scenario that some geneticists see as plausible in our own lifetimes: the resurrection of species driven to extinction, sometimes thousands of years ago.

Thursday will be 60 years since Francis Crick and James Watson published their paper unveiling the structure of DNA, the double-helix code for life.



Farther down the road, other species could live again through artificially reconstituted sequences of their DNA, goes the argument.

“For the gastric frog, it would take maybe a year or two years. For a mammoth maybe 20, 30 years, maybe sooner,” evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar of Canada’s McMaster University said of ongoing “de-extinction” efforts.

In 2009, researchers announced they had cloned a bucardo, also called a Pyrenean ibex, using DNA taken from the last member of this family of Spanish mountain goats before she died in 2000.

This was the first cloned animal born from an extinct subspecies, but the success was mixed. The kid, which was carried to term by a domestic goat, died within 10 minutes from a lung abnormality.

Just last month, a team at Australia’s University of New South Wales said they had cloned embryos of the gastric-brooding frog, which died out in 1983 and was named for its unusual reproductive technique of swallowing its eggs, brooding them in its stomach and then spitting out the offspring.

The cloned embryos all died within a few days.

Australian teams are also working on reviving the Tasmanian tiger with DNA obtained from an ethanol-preserved pup of the marsupial predator, which died out in the 1930s.

In Japan, geneticists said in 2011 they planned to use DNA from frozen carcasses to resurrect within six years the woolly mammoth, which died out during the last Ice Age.


Scientists believe reconstruction will be feasible for most animals for which DNA has survived, possibly going back 200,000 years — a limit that will exclude a revival of the dinosaurs like in “Jurassic Park.”

The DNA sample will have to be well-preserved and techniques will have to improve to reduce the risk of deformity, miscarriage and premature death, a characteristic of animal cloning today.


“I could envision that if there were no laws preventing it and the ethics had been worked out, swaths of land in Siberia repopulated with mammoths and cave lions.

“The discussion is really: ‘Should we?’ “


“My concern is that the focus is too much on, ‘Can we do this?’ rather than what we do with the living being that is the result,” she said.

Many animals went extinct exactly because their natural habitats were destroyed, Friese added.

Lacking a broad gene pool to adapt to the wild, their cloned progeny could find themselves doomed to life as museum exhibits. Nor would they have authentic parents to socialize them or teach them to how to fly, forage or hunt.


Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greely is one of those who enthusiastically favors species resurrection.





“Reconstitution of extinct species is of limited conservation value and could even be a distraction,” said Colman O’Criodain of World Wide Fund for Nature conservation group.

But there are also potential benefits: a harvest of knowledge from studying living versions of extinct animals, and potential environment spinoffs, too.

Some believe returning mammoths to Siberia could turn the barren, mossy tundra back into the fertile grassland it was thousands of years ago.


Transparent debate, not scientific stealth or hubris, offers the only path through this ethical minefield, Poinar said.
