Posted on 09/13/2022 8:56:55 AM PDT by Red Badger
Commentary: A research project to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from oblivion reignites debate about de-extinction.
A preserved thylacine body lies curled up on a metal table. Two scientists in white lab coats handle the body.
PIC at LINK (Getty)
The preserved body of a thylacine being prepared for display in an Australian museum in 2005.
When Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University, took to the stage at 2013's TEDx De-extinction conference in Washington, DC, he posed a simple question.
"De-extinction," he started. "Hubris? Or hope?" The answer, he offered to a smattering of laughter, was "Yes."
Greely's talk, which you can watch on YouTube, has played on my mind a lot since US biotech startup Colossal announced on Aug. 16 that it will finance an extremely ambitious research project to resurrect the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. The dog-like marsupial, native to Australia, was hunted to extinction in the early 1900s. Some scientists believe that, today, we have the genetic engineering tools and bioinformatics processing power to bring it -- or something like it -- back from the dead.
Almost a decade removed from Greely's talk, the idea of de-extinction remains controversial and hotly debated. If the thylacine resurrection announcement is anything to go by, perhaps it's even more contentious today, as climate change, pollution and the biodiversity crisis have only worsened in the past 10 years, raising questions about which problems science should be tackling.
As for the opinion of experts and scientists, it seems like there's a 50-50 split. There are those who believe it to be a worthy pursuit, one that will lead to new conservation technologies and improve our understanding of living species so we can better protect them today.
And then there are those who believe de-extinction is simply spectacle; an unethical, misguided gimmick. Some claim the scientists involved are doing it all for "media attention" and describe the work as technically impossible. Extinction is forever, they say, and nothing can change that.
They're right. Extinction is forever.
"De-extinction" suggests we're able to undo extinction. Reverse it. But the term is misleading. It lacks nuance. And it's even a problem in the scientific literature -- scientists don't fully agree on what de-extinction is.
When the International Union for the Conservation of Nature developed guidelines for resurrecting species in 2016 it specifically noted that none of the methods to de-extinct a species will ever produce a "faithful replica." We can't undo extinction. In fact, the IUCN guideline document doesn't even use the word de-extinction in its title. It's called the "Guiding principles on creating proxies of extinct species for conservation benefit" and proposes that proxy is a much better way to define the kinds of species we will resurrect.
Colossal's well-funded projects on the thylacine and the woolly mammoth adhere to this idea, even if their marketing suggests otherwise. The company and its collaborators will not be able to create an exact genetic replica of animals that once roamed the Earth. Nor will the team at Revive & Restore, working on resurrecting the passenger pigeon. As we currently understand things, it's impossible to bring back a species' behavioral and physiological traits (including things like its microbiome) simply by tinkering with DNA.
"De-extinction" suggests we're able to undo extinction. Reverse it. But the term is misleading. It lacks nuance. Scientists don't fully agree on what de-extinction is. However, it is possible to make significant changes to the DNA, and this technology is improving exponentially. It's very likely that scientists will be able to create a "proxy" species — a thylacine-like creature, perhaps, or some elephant-mammoth hybrid — in the future. Colossal and its research team at the University of Melbourne think this can happen in about a decade for the thylacine, maybe even sooner for the mammoth. Those timelines seem overly optimistic given the technical hurdles that remain, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
The goal of Colossal is to eventually drop its thylacine-like marsupials into Tasmania and mammoth hybrids into the Arctic tundra. This, the researchers say, will have benefits for the ecosystems and the planet. But there are so many questions to answer before we reach that point.
Which is why I keep coming back to Greely's "hubris or hope" talk. In it, he lays out both the potential risks and benefits of bringing back extinct species. He also mentions, presciently, the research won't be funded by governments or research grants. Rather, it will be bankrolled by the private sector and philanthropists. It's a future that's come to pass, so I'm inclined to think Greely knows what he's talking about.
After the news of the thylacine project broke on Tuesday, I asked Greely if there's anything he'd change from that talk almost a decade ago. He said "I think things are [largely] headed where I expected, and wanted — de-extinction as a kind of 'luxury' research project, without government funding, without hysteria, but with care."
I would argue he's mostly correct, though there seems to be a little extra hysteria creeping into the narrative these days. The most common argument against de-extinction I've seen since Colossal's announcement is that scientists are wasting money and time trying to bring back extinct species when we're living through a biodiversity crisis and sending creatures extinct at an unprecedented rate. This is, presumably, heightened by the fact we continue to see climate change wreak havoc on all life on the planet.
Another common argument is that if we have the technology to "de-extinct" species, then extinction doesn't matter anymore. This is a curly moral hazard but it's definitely not the case de-extinction should render extinction irrelevant. Even if it did, should we stop researching the methods needed to bring species back? Should we stop funding these projects altogether? Would that be prudent?
I liken it to the solar geoengineering experiments that would potentially dim the sun with aerosols. Scientists aren't really keen on having to deploy these measures, but what if it became so bad that we had to? Should we not, at the very least, conduct the basic research and science experiments to know? One of the most famous solar geoengineering experiments, Scopex, faced public backlash for not adequately engaging with the community about the experiment it was set to run. As a result, it began a "robust and inclusive" round of engagement with the public.
The conversation needs to begin for de-extinction, too.
What any de-extinction project should do, before we ever get to holding a baby thylacine in our arms, is discuss exactly how such a project will work with all the key stakeholders, from the public to other scientists and industry, as well as with government.
Because if de-extinction researchers truly believe they can resurrect something that walks, runs and weirdly opens its jaw like a thylacine — and they seem to believe they can — then we need to understand where and how these creatures might be returned to the world. We have to know if the public would even want that. Projects like those overseen by Colossal need to start discussions with traditional owners of the land where they might repopulate with a pack of thylacines or elephant-mammoth hybrids. They need to better understand how the creatures might experience pain or suffering once they're brought into today's world, a world that is drastically different from the one their ancestors departed. They need to consider the environmental impacts and the ecosystems they are attempting to alter and convey the risks and uncertainty in the process.
And we need to weigh up, as Greely did, the risks and the benefits. Each of us. For the final word, I'll turn to the professor once again.
Ending his TEDx talk in 2013, he said, "I'm just one voice. I'm not gonna make this decision — you're gonna make this decision."
Updated Aug 21: Edits for clarity around bringing back species as they once were.
See the movie Derzu Uzala (1975) for reference.
Siberia is 5.1 million square miles in size, just a bit smaller than Antarctica. And about as hospitable. So if you plan to visit, to poach some mammoth ivory, be sure to wear warm hiking boots. Not many roads, either.
I have no desire to restore dinosaurs, they are very resilient and survived a LONG time. Also no large predators.
On the other hand, Dodo Birds, Mammoths, Passenger Pidgeons, come to mind. Dodos lived on unpopulated islands and were killed by hungry sailors. They could be reestablished on a unpopulated island. Mammoths in Siberia, or perhaps on a large Arctic island where the last mammoths died only 8,000 years ago (more isolated and safer). The PPs were a major source of food to our early US settlers. Because they seem to only breed in large flocks, when they became too few from overhunting they died out, Establishing a reproducing flock (perhaps 500 individuals) would be quite difficult. Also since they are migratory, legal jurisdictions and protection would be more difficult even if such numbers could be regenerated. I suspect we will get to Mars sooner.
I just want a Dodo bird.
Me too. Dodos were like the Helen Thomases of birds. My dodo could scare away burglars and porch pirates while I’m off riding my cute baby wooly mammoth to the grocery store.
I’m thinking those curly mammoth tusks would come in handy for lots of things other than hanging my grocery bags from them, too. Like coiling the water hose and stuff.
Yeah, bringing back the dodo would be pretty cool. Mammoths, too.
I remember reading early settlers’ accounts of passenger pigeon migrations. They said the sky was darkened by them for a couple of days as the huge numbers of them flew overhead. It must have been quite the sight, and I was sad they had gone extinct. The settlers had a few things to say about their droppings, too, but I’ll leave it at that.
The Passenger Pigeon roosted in geographically limited areas for their mating season, and the hunters just showed up for it and gunned them down, selling the carcasses for use as squab in east coast hotels and other restaurants. Regardless, it was a d***ed pigeon.
There’s a long shot at reviving a genetically narrow version of it, from old feather pillows and museum type specimens, but again, it was a d***ed pigeon.
There’s at least two active programs to revive the full-sized mammoths. Pygmy mammoths were still around in very small numbers (the constraint was the food supply) a mere 2000 years ago.
I’d like to see the revival of the auroch, but as in all these examples, I can live without it.
BTW, note that this is a TEDx talk, given by a lawyer, not a scientist.
We’re already doing it with simpler organisms... COVID-19 & the Spanish Influenza. And we’ve just been thru a worst case scenario with the former.
The Extinctions
Passenger Pigeons: Stewards of the Hardwood Forests
https://www.theextinctions.com/articles-1/passenger-pigeons-stewards-of-the-hardwood-forests
Passsenger Pigeons would probably be the most useful deextinction as they could be a major low cost food source. In fact when they existed in swarms, indentured servants sometimes had contract saying they could only be fed PP a certain number of days a week. Unfortunately breeding the swarm size that would allow mating behavior would not be easy.
Regarding Covid and Spanish Flu, God help us if Spanish Flu gets loose. It killed 50 million people in 2 years. I think Covid has only killed about 6 million, and that is with a world population multi billions of people more these days. Of course we have more experience with flu vaccine, so might get one more quickly, but distribution would be much harder as the SF spread really fast, I could imaging as many as 200 million dead in a year or two. Meanwhile if they don’t get on top of Monkey Pox with serious contact tracing, that could also become endemic, and it should not as it spreads less easily.
The five years of “Spanish Lady” influenza (this is from the Gina Kolata book) shows that the 1916 season saw the start of it, 1918 was the peak, and the trailing years were ‘19 and ‘20. There was something peculiar about that particular strain, as those who were about to die hemorrhaged in their lungs.
Another Kolata find, those who had survived the worst flu strain of the 1890s already had immunity from the Spanish Lady, never even got the sniffles.
The reason so much effort is put into annual innoc’s for flu is to keep the mortality down. In the US, over the ten years from 2010 to 2020, the lowest was in 2011-2012 (12,000) and the worst two (2014-15, 2017-18) around 50,000 fatalities. Average is somewhere around 30,000 a year in the US, and worldwide estimates range from 294,000-518,000.
I’ll go way out on a limb here and suggest that the US, with perhaps 5 percent of the world’s population, has a much better system of dealing with influenza than most of the world, so that these world figures suffer from severe underreporting. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that A) annual worldwide flu fatalities are north of a million, or B) that geography, jet stream, human travel etc tend to disproportionately funnel the bug into North America from its Chinese reservoir/homeland.
Ebola (the bad outbreak in West Africa happened 2013/4–2016, when the Kenyan-born muzzie was in office), and (it sez here) less than a dozen in the US were treated for it, and two died. Worldwide, something like 11K died, mostly in western Africa.
They only called it the "Spanish Flu", because as a neutral during WWI, Spain was one of the few countries that didn't censor reports of cases in their country, thus the only reports people heard about were the cases in Spain. There is speculation that there were so many cases in Germany, it was a factor in them losing the war.
The reason Germany/Austria-Hungary lost was that the US entered the war. Obviously the flu would have impacted all combatants. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that the 1916/1917 hit the Russians as well, and helped push that regime off the cliff and out of the war.
Here’s a group trying to recreate the Passenger Pigeon:
https://reviverestore.org/about-the-passenger-pigeon/
1918 Spanish Flu has been reconstructed:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm
IIRC “Mother Abigail” who once posted here said that cytokine storms were a factor in the lethality of that flu. Hybrid human-animal flus can provoke cytokine storms and 1918 was an H1N1 virus mixed with avian flu.
Cytokine storms may also have played a role in the lethality of the original Covid strain. It can cause multiple organ failure and death.
“Meanwhile if they don’t get on top of Monkey Pox with serious contact tracing, that could also become endemic, and it should not as it spreads less easily.”
Smallpox vaccines are supposedly effective against Monkey Pox. Unless we quit routinely vaxxing for smallpox there shouldn’t be a lot of risk in this country.
There’s been the theory that the Spanish Flu originated in western Kansas.
More recent is the theory that Chinese laborers brought it from China to Canada. Canada entered the war long before we did and they had a labor shortage that had them importing Chinese help.
I blame Coronado.
We stopped vaccinating for smallpox in 1972. It was declared to be eradicated from the Earth in 1980, IIRC.
The first known human monkeypox cases showed up in Africa in the 1970s, and at first occurred mainly in small children. As the the children who had never been vaccinated aged up, monkeypox began to be seen in older children, then teens, then adults.
I’m not all that worried about monkeypox becoming a big thing outside the gay population. It’s not all that easy to catch.
Re your #55, I’ve read about the Kansas theory, but didn’t know about the Canada one. It actually makes more sense. Thanks for cluing me in!
Wonderful article. Long read, but worth it! Thank you :)
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