Posted on 03/22/2022 7:13:53 AM PDT by SJackson
A new paper explores how gene-editing technology could be used to bring a species back, but even its authors have concerns about what that could mean.
If Tom Gilbert could bring any extinct animal back to life, he said, it wouldn't be dinosaurs or woolly mammoths or any other megafauna that once roamed the planet. His is a humbler choice: the Christmas Island rat, a species that was wiped out from its island home in the Indian Ocean more than a century ago.
Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, admitted that his pick may not be the most sensational, but he said it's likely the most feasible with today's gene-editing technology.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology, he and his colleagues examined how the Christmas Island rat could be revived, as well as the current limitations to "de-extinction." The research raises big questions about how successful de-extinction efforts can be, which types of animals should be brought back, and the ethical quandaries of tinkering with nature.
"We did this as a proof of principle that you might not get back what you think you're going to get," Gilbert said.
The researchers focused on how the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to alter the genetic blueprint of a closely related living species to essentially re-create one that went extinct. This method of editing genomes for the purposes of de-extinction was most famously pioneered by Harvard University biologist George Church, who has spent nearly a decade trying to splice the DNA of Asian elephants with woolly mammoth genes in hopes of resurrecting the extinct, shaggy-haired beasts.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Seems to me if you want to de-extinct the Christmas Island Rat it would be better to do it on Christmas Island rather than Copenhagen.
What’s the worse that can happen? /s
It’s a rat. Why bring back another species of rat?
We have way cooler extinct animals we should bring back first besides some lame rat.
Of course I refer to the Dodo bird
I’d prefer they bring back the Dodo.
It’s a fun animal, goofy looking, very tame, and they have soft-tissue to extract the DNA from.
Great minds, etcetera. :)
I still say go for the T-Rex
Coming an Ice Age mammoth loose and rampaging around would be so cool!
Pioneering work for people who want to trans-species themselves or others.
Maybe we could mass breed them and ration their meat out to a starving populace?
1,400 living species of rat. And that’s just counting the “true rats,” not the God-knows-how-many species of similar-looking creatures that are also given the name “rat” in their common names.
I would rather they bring back the giant palm tree that used to grow on that island. It went extinct just a thousand years ago or so.
oops, the giant palm tree I mentioned was on Easter Island, not Christmas Island.
Exactly.
Velociraptors. ;-)
We already have democRATS. I say we should breed them OUT of existence!
I'd go with the Arabian Ostrich. We know they taste good, lay large eggs, if extinct only since the 1960s, and an insurance company could use them as a mascot. And they probably share lots of genes with other ostriches.
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