by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
A British biologist named John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become “pluripotent.” That means mature cells can be converted into stem cells, so brain cells can be changed into heart, foot, or skin cells. That enabled Gurdon in 1962 to clone the first vertebrate in his lab, an African clawed frog, now considered an invasive species in most of Europe, China, and the U.S.
This was interesting mainly to scientists until 1996 when a Scottish lab cloned the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, an overnight global media sensation. It proved that the nucleus from an adult cell, transferred into an unfertilized egg, can divide and develop in the same mysterious way it does in a real womb. Since then, many other mammals have been cloned, including deer, pigs, horses, and cattle.
It was only a matter of time before geneticists decided to try the same technology to bring back an extinct species, too. For years there has been speculation about recreating the wooly mammoth, for example, because there are frozen carcasses to work with. One of the nation’s most famous pioneers in this field is Dr. George Church, a Harvard genetics professor whose team has now broken the technological barrier, announcing the rebirth of the extinct prehistoric dire wolf, made famous in the Game of Thrones series, and in games like Dungeons and Dragons. It is now the world’s first successfully “de-extincted” animal. The dire wolf was extinct for centuries, but now three pups have been “born,” starting with DNA from a 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull. Dr. Church’s company, created for the specific purpose of “de-extinction,” calls the dire wolves’ birth “a critical step on the pathway to the de-extinction of other target species.”
What species might that be? Or perhaps even more fundamentally — who will decide what extinct species should be brought back? The company plans eventually to restore the dire wolf on “expansive ecological preserves potentially on indigenous land.” What land where, and again, who will decide? The ethical questions accompanying mankind’s ability to recreate extinct species are profound.
