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 ...
[singing] Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rat...
Or the passenger pigeon.
occamrzr06 ~ What’s the worse that can happen? /s
In Copenhagen?
So Christmas Island got rid of its rats, which likely first arrived there on a human conveyance anyway, and now they want to clone them back into prosperity? Mmmmf...
Willard.
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