![]() “Extinction is forever,” she said in a recent interview with Scientific American. Shapiro is the first to acknowledge that creating a replica of an animal isn’t the same as bringing it back from extinction. ![]() ![]() The result will look and act like a dodo, but won’t exactly be the real thing. So, they’ll adjust the genes until they can create an oversized pigeon with a large beak, undersized wings, and a curved neck, among other features. Then, the team will have to tweak the pigeon’s genome so that it takes on the characteristic features of the dodo. A three-foot tall pigeon: the stuff nightmares are made of. The current plan seems to be to genetically engineer a pigeon-one of the dodo’s closest living relatives-until it’s the appropriate size. To bring the dodo “back to life,” Colossal will have to first find a suitable host animal that can lay the dodo egg. Other scientists worry about the ethical implications of building new creatures, which is essentially what Colossal’s dodo will be. $150 million, after all, could do an awful lot to protect endangered species that actually still exist-especially the ones that aren’t as cute or charismatic as the dodo. Some say bringing back an extinct bird is a poor use of resources. They’ve also raised quite a few eyebrows.īiologists across the world have reacted with outrage at the boldness of the plan. Helmed by world-renowned paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro, entrepreneur Ben Lamm, and Harvard geneticist George Church, the Colossal Biosciences team has raised about $150 million in funding for the project already. Now, venture capital-backed genetics firm Colossal Biosciences wants to right a historic wrong-and push the limits of modern genetics-by bringing the dodo back. Before that happened, they reportedly numbered in the thousands. According to even the most optimistic scientific models, they died out for good around 1690, shortly after European settlers arrived on Mauritius and systematically killed them all. Technologies developed as part of the potential de-extinction process could eventually have uses for human beings as well.Ĭolossal CEO Ben Lamm told Axios that “growing humans ex utero, full gestation, I do think at some point that technology is inevitable,” although he noted that ethical concerns would drive more resources towards improving in-vitro fertilization in the interim.Colossal Biosciences, a U.S.-based gene editing company, has just announced an ambitious new plan to “de-extinct” the dodo.ĭodoes-three-foot-tall flightless birds that once thrived on the African island Mauritius-went extinct sometime in the 17th century. The hope is that we can use, first, comparative genomics so we can get at least one, and hopefully more, dodo genomes that we can use to look and see how dodos are similar to each other, and different from things like the solitaire,” or Nicobar pigeon, Ms. “Once a species is extinct, it’s really not possible to bring back an identical copy. For the dodo, the closest relative is the Nicobar pigeon for the wooly mammoth also being worked on by Colossal, African and Asian elephants are used. De-extinction uses DNA from preserved samples of extinct species, as well as DNA from close living relatives.
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