Colossal Biosciences, a Texas firm that is the world’s first “de-extinction” company, has announced it has obtained $150 million in funding to bring back the extinct dodo bird. Of course, it helped that the project’s goal was ostensibly tied to “climate change.”
Colossal Biosciences, which previously made headlines for its plans to to bring back the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger, says it is now turning its attention to the dodo.The bird, which is closely related to pigeons, went extinct in 1662 after being wiped out from its native ecosystem, Mauritius, because of human settlement and ecosystem competition. The dodo is widely considered one of the best examples of human-induced extinction.The dodo will mark the third animal the company is working on. Colossal is most famous for its lofty goal of creating a woolly mammoth-elephant hybrid, but the company also announced plans last year to try and back another extinct animal, the Tasmanian tiger.Colossal Biosciences, which this week announced a new $150 million funding round, is led by Austin-based entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical School, was formed in 2021 with the goal of advancing the field of de-extinction and combating climate change.
The approach will be based on CRISPR/Cas9 technology, which edits genes by precisely cutting DNA and then letting natural DNA repair processes to take over. The researchers plan to cut and paste the genetic code to align it as closely with the dodo samples as possible.
In mammals, this gene-edited material would then be embedded in the reproductive system of an existing relative of the species.But because the dodo is a bird, the technique has to be tweaked somewhat because it needs to account for an external egg. This will be tricky, as no one has yet managed to use gene-editing for birds in this way.In the dodo’s case, scientists will take primordial germ cells – embryonic precursors of sperm and egg that pass on genetic code from one generation to the next – from a Nicobar pigeon.They will then edit these cells to more closely resemble a dodo, such as its flightlessness, and then insert them back into a host pigeon egg.When the resulting chick hatches it may have a few differences compared to the original species, just because of how challenging it is to 100 per cent replicate an extinct creature’s genetic code.
So, in this case, the egg will definitely come first.
It turns out the first dodo DNA samples were able to be collected last year. However, there is no need to worry about T-Rex or velociraptor returning.
Forget Jurassic Park, though: dinosaurs, dead for tens of millions of years, remain inaccessible, their genetic material having disintegrated long ago. Extracting their genes from mosquitoes in amber made a good plot for a novel and movie franchise, but can’t and won’t work in practice.
Those qualms aside, some do see problems arising from pursuing this avenue of experimentation.
“Bringing dodos back does not help the species (I’m not sure that idea makes any sense). Nor does it help the actual dodos who were victims of human activities,” Josh Milburn, a moral and political philosophy lecturer at Loughborough University, told Newsweek. “It just creates new dodos. Does it help us? Creating animals just for our own curiosity does not sound respectful; it sounds like we’re instrumentalising these animals.. . . . Milburn argues that the newly de-extinct dodos would not have a good life, and neither would any of the other animals impacted by the project.”If de-extinction efforts are successful, what will happen to the dodos created? Will they be kept in zoos for our amusement? That sounds wrong. We should not create animals just so we can exploit them,” Milburn said.
Others note an entirely different problem.
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