Matt Ridley on the soon-to-be-possible reversal of species extinction:
The founders of Revive and Restore aren’t mainstream scientists, but they’re not people to be taken lightly, either. Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan are a husband-and-wife team with a track record of starting unusual but successful organizations — in his case, the Whole Earth Catalog and the Global Business Network; in hers, the consumer-focused startups Direct Medical Knowledge and DNA Direct. They’ve attracted the interest of the pioneering Harvard University DNA sequencing and synthesis expert George Church.
Their argument is that it’s time to start tentatively trying de-extinction and thinking through its ethical and ecological implications. There are already projects under way to revive extinct subspecies like the European aurochs (a type of wild cattle) and the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo. In the latter case, when the last female (Celia) was killed by a falling tree in 2000, her tissue was cloned. At least one fetus survived to term in a surrogate mother goat, but it died soon after birth.
A full species that’s been extinct for decades like the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) or the passenger pigeon — the last one of which, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo 99 years ago — will be a taller order, since the DNA from long dead specimens is fragmented. Yet Ben Novak, a young researcher working with the ancient-DNA expert Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has extracted passenger pigeon DNA from the toe pad of a museum specimen and sequenced it. Dr. Church hopes to use one of the newly invented letter-by-letter gene-replacement techniques, such as Talens or Crispr, to transform the genome of a related species called the band-tailed pigeon into that of a passenger pigeon.
