Everyone has heard of de-extinction. Everyone.
If they haven't, and are brave enough to ask casually in conversation, and if the person responding doesn't want to take the time to actually explain it—or doesn't actually know—then the response will consist of exactly four words: It's basically Jurassic Park.
As a result, the story is everywhere. While some of my no less-obscure Google Alerts lie dormant for weeks before cropping up with new material from some weird corner of the internet, de-extinction merits a several-times-weekly type discussion.
Everyone—from Think Christian to the Martha's Vineyard Gazette—is interested in the fact that this could really be happening. Jurassic Park could really be happening.
But is it? Yes and no. What has been framed within the Biblical rhetoric of revival and resurrection is really occurring using the now commonplace approaches of genetic engineering, amped up to a level that—while undoubtedly impressive—raises many more questions about what we can and should do with a technology that's already steeped in ambivalence.
"This is not about making the perfect wooly mammoth—it's about making cold-resistant elephants," said Harvard geneticist George Church at a conference in October. Church's lab is currently working to revive a wooly mammoth-like elephant in hopes of restoring the grasslands of the Arctic tundra.
Or, as he told New York Times Magazine in response to criticism regarding the project's hype from fellow researchers, "I would like to have an elephant that likes the cold weather. Whether you call it a 'mammoth' or not, I don't care." (The NYT Mag article in question ran with the headline "The Mammoth Cometh.")
Techno-scientifically, engineering an elephant that is fat, hairy, and has cold-adapted hemoglobin would be an impressive feat requiring "a few dozen" changes to the animal's genome. But resurrection, this is not.
So why is it called de-extinction in the first place? The story goes back to Stewart Brand, a man who has done more to define our day-to-day experience in the digital age than most people who actively played a part in creating it. To put it simply, the 75-year old Brand loves playing with big ideas, and the idea of bringing back extinct species is nothing if not huge.
In February of 2013, Brand gave an eighteen-minute TED Talk entitled, "The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?" In the talk, which has since been viewed over 1.6 million times and has been translated into 24 languages, Brand told a tale in broad strokes of the wildlife-destroying Anthropocene, as evidenced by the extinction of the once ubiquitous passenger pigeon.
"Sorrow, anger, mourning. Don't mourn—organize," Brand told an audience of people who had each paid several thousand dollars to attend the popular talk forum devoted to spreading the "power of ideas."
"What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back?" Brand asked. Thanks to new developments in genome assembly, synthetic biology, and interspecies cloning, Brand said, bringing extinct species back into existence was now a distinct possibility.
This moment effectively served as the launching pad for Brand's newest venture, an organization called Revive & Restore that would be devoted to resurrecting extinct species using biotechnology. The project would be just one arm of Brand's Long Now Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to getting "people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future."
Perhaps most well known for its 300-foot-tall stainless steel 10,000 Year Clock—financed by a $42 million investment from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and built inside a mountain that Bezos owns in Texas—Long Now's most recent project was sending a nickel disk inscribed with 1,500 languages to "Rosetta's Comet" via the Rosetta space probe.
While these projects are at turns overly glorified or dismissed as New Age oddities, they are foremost large-scale art projects. Viewed in this way, the de-extinction project is the perfect addition to Brand's portfolio.
While Revive & Restore's flagship project is to clone the passenger pigeon back into existence, it is also aiming to resurrect the wooly mammoth in collaboration with Church's lab at Harvard. In addition, it plans to serve as a de-extinction hub of sorts, convening meetings and fostering communication across disciplinary boundaries among the scientists, conservationists, and ethicists working on relevant aspects of the project worldwide.
However, the project also has another, bigger goal: Brand wants to persuade the environmentalist and conservationist communities, which he repeatedly argues are stuck in a negative view of the world, to instead embrace the optimism of technology.
"The environmental and conservation movements have mired themselves in a tragic view of life," Brand wrote in a letter to Church and biologist E.O. Wilson before launching the project. "The return of the passenger pigeon could shake them out of it—and invite them to embrace prudent biotechnology as a Green tool instead of menace in this century."
"Could be fun. Could improve things. It could, as they say, advance the story," he wrote.
A year later, however, the story has mostly raised lots of questions from disparate stakeholders staring at each other across a vast expanse of muddled misunderstanding.
How arbitrary or specific are species boundaries in the first place?
In an era when endangered species are being cloned in zoos, where are conservation's limits?
What role have/do/should humans play in reinventing nature?
These questions are the beauty of a project whose grandiose packaging far outweighs its realities: Revive & Restore currently has only one full-time employee, a passenger pigeon-enthusiast with a bachelors degree in ecology but no advanced scientific qualifications. He has admitted it could be up to two decades before anything closely resembling a flock of passenger pigeons takes to the skies. Yet it's advancing a story.
In one of the few bioethical analyses of de-extinction written to date, author Ronald Sandler concluded by saying that, "The considerations in favor of de-extinction are largely techno-science oriented, not conservation-oriented." Given that there is no pressing need to pursue it, from Sandler's ethical perspective, "De-extinction is a luxury."
It may partially be an exercise in seeing what we can do with the latest genome editing technologies, whether we can make a creature as large an elephant give birth to something slightly different, whether we can then teach those animals to live and breed together, whether they can then manage to do so in the Arctic, and whether then some of the damage wrought as a result of climate change might somehow be erased via the pounding feet of herds of fat, hairy elephants.
If so, it's a bad scientific solution; but in the meantime, it's a great story.
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