Can we De-extinct Animals?

Imagine the world in the not-too-distant future. Listeners to this podcast today could still be alive on the day we are imagining. The sun rises, it is a warm day, and we look at the sky. There are clouds and planes, but otherwise empty. Some would say we are in the year 2100. Others would claim we are in the year 2050. Regardless of which tomorrow we are looking at, we live in a dystopia regarding life on Earth. As of this day, fifty percent of the animal and plant species on the Earth in the year 2000 have just gone extinct. This threat didn't develop overnight, nor was the Earth hit by an asteroid. We didn't have a natural mass catastrophe.

This prediction is set out by those who observe our planet's climate and its reaction to our pollution. Scientists have been warning society of the possibilities since at least March 1912. It's not a pretty picture; many would politicalize the situation. We're not going to do that. Instead, we are going to explore how to make this possible future . . . never happen.

I may sound pessimistic about our future for a moment. The truth is, I'm not. When it comes to the problems facing us as a species, I see thought leaders broken down into three categories. I'll borrow the names of two groups from Charles C. Mann's book: the Prophets and the Wizards. The third group is the Ostrich. (Poor bird. I mean no insult to the animal, but it is a perfect metaphor.)

 The Prophets see the problem coming. They warn of what might happen. They show us what will happen. The Prophets take an approach that we need to peel away from the brink of disaster, step back, and reverse what we are doing. They could be right.

I place my hopes in the Wizards. The Wizards see the same problem. They often will agree with the predictions of the Prophets' warning. However, instead of pulling back, they use our curiosity, imagination, and drive to find solutions for the coming doom—bridging the chasm of destruction to a new world.

Meanwhile, the third group, the Ostriches, try to make the science behind the warnings seem designed to support a pundit position as they hide their heads in the sand and claim the problem doesn't exist. The Ostriches are right about one thing--science can be political. But they are also wrong about another. Science is never partisan.

We have seen in our imagination the world's future as predicted by the Prophets. Let's now consider a different world, a different future.

You step outside into the sunlight, but this time, for some, have moved locations. We are up in the subarctic. Hopefully, you have something warm in your hands as you look up at the blue sky. It could be coffee, tea, hot chocolate—whatever you wish to imagine. Birds soar overhead as you see the sun, clouds, and planes in the air. You take a breath and feel, rather than hear, an impact tremor. The tremors grow as their cause grows closer.

No—it's not a T-rex from Jurassic Park. You can place that fear aside, and I will explain later why. Instead, you see a herd of elephants with long fur and long tusks trampling the snow into the ground. They are knocking over the conifer trees to let the grass grow again across the tundra.

Wait . . . did I say you are staring at woolly mammoths? Well, in a way, you are.

The technological methods of Genetic Engineering have grown through giant leaps over the last twenty years. Before the turn of the century, we could clone sheep. In the early part of the 21st century, we tried to bring back the Pyrenees Goat from extinction. It had just gone extinct in 2008. Scientists from

Spain and France were able to have a live birth of the clone, but it died soon after due to a lung deformation, and the species went extinct for a second time. That was before even more significant discoveries in genetics and genetic engineering.

Some listening to me right now may ask, "Are we playing god, deciding what animals come back from the dead and which won't?" I would respond with a simple statement. "You're missing something in that question. With what we can now achieve through this science, we aren't playing anymore."

Let that response seep in for a moment. As I researched this topic, I felt a concern go down my back, and I could hear Dr. Malcom from Jurassic Park saying, "We are too busy trying to see if we can do a thing that we aren't asking if we should." The reality is Pandora's box is open. The question is, what do we do with it now?

Can we bring animals back from extinction? The answer is yes-kind of.

Kind of?

The truth is that once an animal has gone extinct, it is extinct. We will never be able to bring back a species fully. But we create a functional equivalent. We can achieve this through three methods or their combination.

Before I go into those methods, let me either put concerns about bringing dinosaurs back to life aside or break children's hearts. (But, seriously, do you want T-Rexs and Velociraptors running around? Sure, a Brontosaurus might be cute, but would you want to have that walking around freely in the world?)

So, why no dinosaurs? Aren't there mosquitoes trapped in amber or something with dino-blood and thus dino-DNA? When Michael Crichton wrote the novel Jurassic Park, he focused on what the next level of "amusement park" experience might he saw us desiring in the future. A desire to go from the planned thrills to more realistic ones.

In the 1990s, genetic engineering had come a long way, and Michael Crichton did his homework well—as he always did. However, it was more exciting for the story to bring back dinosaurs than a saber-tooth tiger (which I would find terrifying as well). But we will never be able to make that part of fiction a reality—thankfully.

DNA has a half-life of 100,000 years. What do I mean? Yes, there is Dino-DNA in mosquitoes trapped in amber. For the record, amber is a horrible preservation material for DNA. The Dino-DNA extracted is too corrupted by time and thus useless for de-extinction. Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago.

Outside of what little we can find in these preserved mosquitoes, anything else dino-related is fossilized. Fossils are rocks and don't have DNA.

I am sorry if I broke a child's heart by saying we can't bring back their favorite dinosaur. If I broke an adult's heart by saying it, I must ask, "what part of that being a bad idea is unclear?"

So, what can we bring back? We can, through genetic engineering, de-extinct any animal (or plant) whose DNA was preserved—either by us or has been found frozen. Sadly, or fortunately, this won't be every species that has existed and died out over the last 100,000 years.

Furthermore, are we bringing them back from extinction? Yes . . . no . . . kind of. What we would be doing is creating a functional equivalent.

A what a?

We would be creating a functional equivalent to the creature that had gone extinct—it would be a new form of the beast, and how different or alike it would depend on the method or methods we use to do it.

There are three basic methods of de-extinction. I will briefly introduce what they are and how they are used to de-extinct animals. (Otherwise, this episode may be over five hours long.)

The first method is something we humans have done since we started to work with animals and plants. It can be a haphazard method as we are not always sure of the results or the side effects that can come from it—and that is breeding. In this case, what we would do is back-breed.

Back-Breeding, like breeding, is taking two animals related to an extinct animal and breeding them for a specific trait. We see what comes from that and breed, again and again, to get what we want. Eventually, if we are lucky enough and do it right, we will have something that looks like what went extinct.

Let's use an example of the quagga. The quagga went extinct in our history due to hunting. It was an animal that was closely related to the zebra. Like the zebra, it had stripes. But the strips only covered the front part of the animal. If we used back-breeding to bring the quagga back to life, we would breed zebras that don't have perfect stripping in their rear quarter.

Over the generations of the process, we would remove or make the genes dormant for the striping in the back. As we do, we create the quagga—or rather, a functional equivalent to it.

A second process is cloning. Going back to Jurassic Park, this was the process that they did. We have successfully cloned animals. We successfully clone plants all the time. As for bringing an animal back from extinction, we have been successful. Well, kind of.

Cloning works by taking the egg of the same species or, in the case of bringing something back from extinction, a close relative. We remove the DNA from the egg's nucleus and inject the DNA of the animal we want to clone. We put that egg inside a surrogate mother, and out comes the baby.

We have used this process on sheep (look up Dolly the Sheep), we can clone our pets that have passed away, and more. Bringing back an extinct animal is tricky. We have done it—for a short period. In January 2000, the Pyrenean Ibex went extinct. Three years later, a group of Spanish and French scientists used this cloning method to give birth to a baby Pyrenean Ibex. Sadly, the baby didn't survive after birth for too long. It had a lung defect, and the species went extinct again.

While that was not long ago, we have made considerable leaps in genetic engineering that could give the cloning process hope—and that leads me to the third process: Gene Editing.

Gene editing is where we can remove strands of DNA and replace them with new strands. Let's use a computer code as an example for a moment. DNA is indeed like a computer code. A computer programmer sits down and types out their code. Then as they read over the code, they see an error or something they don't like. They erase—or cut—that part of the code out and replace it with new code. In simplistic terms, this is what gene editing does.

Over the decades, gene editing has been using various methods in and outside the lab. The tools used for gene editing have been expensive until recently.

In 1987, scientists found that bacteria were naturally able to fight off viruses by rewriting the virus DNA, like our own immune system. In 2012, scientists were able to perfect this method and use it to edit genes in the lab, and we have since been able to use it to fight diseases and create vaccines faster and more efficiently. The process is known as CRISPR Cas-9, or CRISPR for short.

Regardless of whether it was ethical or moral, a scientist in 2015 from China used this to edit the genes inside the embryos of two human babies. The editing was to make their immune system more resistant to the AIDS virus. The children were born.

As we explore bringing animals back from extinction, this process can be used to implant DNA from extinct animals into their close relative and create—or recreate the species or a functional equivalent.

At this point, I am guessing you're asking one of two questions. I know I was when I did the research and got this far. One question is, why would we want to bring these animals back from extinction, especially ones long since extinct, and that humans didn't cause extinction? The second question will be, what kind of problems might we have if we do this? You may also have a third question: wouldn't the money be used to resurrect long-dead animals be better spent on keeping the ones alive that we have now?

The answers to these questions are vast and deep as the web of life itself. So, let's start diving into them.

Why bring back extinct animals? Some describe life as a tree with all the unique kinds of life as its branches and roots. I am going to use a different metaphor. It is like a web, with each lifeform being a strand of that web. Looking at a spider's web, you can see how those strands span and support the other strands. You can sometimes see holes where parts of the web have come apart, yet the web holds together despite the gaps. That is the web of life as it is now. Eventually, the web will have too many holes to stay up unless the spider repairs those holes. In the web of life, we have become that repairing spider—I never thought before I wrote this I would compare us with spiders, but I just did.

Our ecosystem is balanced upon this web of life, as is our planet's habitability—for food, oxygen, and livable temperatures. Some scientists today are working on bringing back the Wooly Mammoth and say they should have it reintroduced into the sub-artic tundra in 2028.

Despite the grandiose claims there, you probably asked the same question I asked as I read up on what they were doing: Why? After all, we, as a species, didn't drive them into extinction. Mostly, they died out tens of thousands of years ago. One colony lived roughly 3 to 4 thousand years ago because they separate due to ice melting. From the evidence we have found both on the island where they were and the DNA we have recovered, they didn't interact with humans—so we didn't kill them. It appears they died out because their gene pool became too shallow to reproduce without mutations that would lead to their extinction.

So again, why? Colossus, the company working on this, reasons that after the passing of the Wooly Mammoth, temperatures began to rise as the tundra began to change from sub-artic grasslands to sub-artic forests. The conifer trees don't trap carbon and methane, the same as the grass. Wooly Mammoth, like their cousins, the Asian Elephant, were like bulldozers. They would knock down the trees, trampling them into the permafrost and trap the carbon. The trampling would allow the grass to grow again and reduce the temperature close to the surface. This process would trap methane as well. In doing this, the subarctic’s albedo would reflect the sun's light better, which would help with the region's cooling, help prevent the ice

sheets from melting, and help reverse the planet's rising temperatures.

Ok, what about other existing animals? Couldn't they do the same? According to the information I researched for this podcast, such animals were introduced, but they aren't being as successful.

I still have legions of questions, and I suspect you do. But, accepting their argument for the moment, let's look at the second question: What kind of problems could the resurrection of these animals pose?

The first problem is the choice of what we bring back. Do we only bring back herbivores? If we do, then how do we keep their population under control? Would existing predators be able to hunt them? Would we need to hunt them as we do other herbivore to control their populations and damage to the land and to property? Would we have to bring back the carnivores that naturally hunted the herbivores? Then that raises another question, what harm would those carnivores do to the existing animal (including human) population?

As I explored these questions, I couldn't help but think about similar situations in Australia, where new species were introduced to control an invasive species only to have to manage that species and so on. There are other examples, but this is one the best known.

Another problem I explored was: Can the species we resurrect survive in the modern world? What would the contemporary world look like if they were back? What would the modern world do to the instincts of these animals? And that leads to another question—how would these animals know how to act?!

Animals are born with certain instincts, and other traits are taught to them, often from the socialization of their parents or a greater community. But if these animals are extinct, who teaches them? Do humans have to teach a resurrected wooly mammoth to behave like a wooly mammoth? Would a surrogate family, like the Asian Elephant, teach them? How does a wooly mammoth behave in the first place?

For some animals we know the answer to—or think we do, but that still raises those same questions. And yes, humans have successfully trained abandoned animals to act like others of their species, so it would not be a new problem.

Let's talk about the third question: Why waste money trying to bring these animals back to life? Shouldn't we focus those funds on preserving what we have left? It is a great question, and it is essential to see that the answer is not simple. The technology being created and used to bring extinct animals back to life is the same technology and methods that go into our arsenal to keep the ones alive today from perishing.

As we try to resurrect extinct animals, we must understand the ecology and the biodiversity in that ecosystem and inside of the species. We use this same technology to help keep the existing animals biodiverse so that their population doesn't drop down to a level where they cannot do it for themselves. And if it is, we can use this technology to support and reintroduce that biodiversity by helping to breed them to survive and even thrive as our world changes.

As we try to conserve the existing animals, we run into complex problems because the web of life is complicated. Nothing is as simple as it may appear on the surface. We may not be able to save them right away. Not everything is a TV episode where the solution is just in time to save the dying patient. We might have to resurrect the animal to save it.

Furthermore, strictly from a species-centric or selfish point of view, extinct animals and the process of bringing them back to life could help us, as humans, adapt to our environment, bring about medical and other biological discoveries, and save ourselves from extinction.

 Humans are staring the sixth mass extinction in our planet's history in the face. Some say they found evidence of another, so this may be the seventh. In this case, it doesn't matter because, unlike those that lived in the previous mass extinctions, we can do something about it.

There are times I get frustrated and depressed about my fellow human. As I mentioned, thought leaders can be divided into three categories: the Prophet, the Wizard, and the Ostrich. Of these, I find the Ostrich to be the most prominent cause of that depression. But I also find hope in my fellow humans because of the Prophet and the Wizard. We are a clever species. We are the alpha predator on this planet not because of our size, not necessarily our numbers, and certainly not because of our strength. We are where we are because of our problem-solving ability and our ability to make technology. It can be argued that our technology is a cause of our problems—just as we can say that we rely on our tools and technologies so much that we live inside of them (yes, homes are tools). Yet, with our ability with tools, technologies, and problem-solving imaginations, we have overcome events caused by ourselves and by natural disasters, which should have caused us to either be on the endangered species list or have gone extinct.

It is our drive, our curiosity, and our need to Explore Beyond what is known to discover what lies ahead that gives us the seeds of hope for our future.