Resurrected Mammoths and Dodos? Don't Count on it
By David Ehrenfeld,
The Guardian
| 03. 23. 2013
I recently spoke at
Revive & Restore's
TEDx DeExtinction event at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington DC. Most of the speakers were brilliant geneticists working on ways to revive species that no longer live on earth by injecting DNA from extinct species into eggs of living relatives. The atmosphere was electric with the hopes and claims of top scientists bent on bringing back the
woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon, and other vanished species. I was the invited skeptic, and here's what I told them, more or less.
The poster child for de-extinction is
the passenger pigeon. The first European visitors to North America saw flocks so huge that they darkened the skies from horizon to horizon. Even in the 19th century, when the pigeons were starting to decline, observers estimated over a billion birds in some flocks. A market hunter with a shotgun could kill 50 or 100 with a single shot. The combined weight of the pigeons could bring down giant tree limbs with a sound like cannon fire. Yet the last passenger pigeon, a...
Related Articles
By Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times | 04.03.2024
By Rob Stein, NPR | 03.21.2024
For the first time, surgeons have transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a living person, doctors in Boston said Thursday.
Richard Slayman, 62, of Weymouth, Mass., who is suffering from end-stage kidney disease, received the organ...
Sheep have been domesticated for roughly 12,000 years. Sheep have also been cloned since 1996; Dolly (pictured) was the first mammal to suffer that indignity. But this news was featured in the March 14 issue of Business Insider:
Montana rancher paid $4,200 to clone a dead sheep and launched a farm of super hybrids worth up to $550,000
Some people — not just Montanans but Texans too and probably others — pay to indulge in “captive hunting,” and large...
By Matt Novak, Gizmodo | 03.12.2024
An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally...