By Mac Bellingham
“Jurassic Park” is one of my favourite movies and books, but I never really assumed it was scientifically accurate, instead taking creative liberties when it comes to bringing back extinct animals. However, fiction mirrors reality, as there is a billion-dollar company, Colossal Biosciences, that plans on bringing back long-gone animals.
The two creators of this company, Ben Lamm, a tech entrepreneur, and George Church, a geneticist, first announced this project in 2021, originally only saying that they would bring back the woolly mammoth. Church stated that this would “make all the difference in the world”. A year later, they announced their plans to bring back the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, and just this February, they announced another plan to bring back the dodo.
The technology used to bring back these extinct species is CRISPR, a technology that allows scientists to edit DNA, using a specific protein that deletes specific genomes. To bring back extinct species, Colossal Biosciences have to secure some DNA of the extinct species, then use that animal’s closest relative, in the woolly mammoth’s case, the Asian elephant, and attempt to splice some of their DNA together. Somehow, Colossal Biosciences have managed to secure woolly mammoth DNA, despite them going extinct over 4000 years ago, and are repeating this process for them and the thylacine. For the dodo, it’s another story. The avian cloning process is different from those of mammals, as attempting to culture germ cells from other bird species is a difficult task, and it requires a whole other process. However, the ideal result is the same: a genetically sound extinct species.
Although the science behind this is certainly interesting, many scientists debate whether this should even be happening at all. Many of these species are long gone, so why should we spend so much time and money trying to bring them back when we could be focusing on conserving current animal species that are in the process of extinction? Colossal Biosciences gained 150 million dollars in private Series B funding, money which could easily be going towards a more worthy cause, such as investing in conservation projects by environmentalists.
I believe that bringing back the thylacine and dodo would perhaps be a worthwhile investment, as thylacines went extinct only around 100 years ago, and have created a tangible negative impact in their ecosystems. For instance, the loss of an apex predator created contagious tumours for wombat species in Australasia, leading to a declining population of wombats. The dodo did go extinct in 1681, but its extinction led to animals in Mauritius no longer being able to effectively swallow seeds, as they have grown smaller. If those animals were successfully cloned and brought back to the wild, they would be able to conserve those populations. The woolly mammoth being brought back is completely ridiculous in my opinion, existing solely for media purposes, but serving no real purpose to the wild. But for the cost of this technology, I believe it is worth it to try and find inventive solutions to current extinctions. The Amur leopard, Sumatran rhino, Sunda pangolin, etc, are all species that contribute greatly to biodiversity but are unfortunately endangered due to humans. If Colossal Biosciences is worth a billion dollars, surely bioscience companies could invest money into various environmental organisations working on saving our planet. Sure, being able to create the technology needed to bring extinct species back is interesting, but right now pushing the limits of science should not be our priority in a time where more species are extinct than ever. We should be focusing on the present and preservation of species, rather than the past, to save our planet and biodiversity.