Over the past few years our conversations have occasionally focused on scientific developments and their potential ethical, moral, or theological implications. We’ve taken on artificial intelligence and robotics, de-aging, genetic engineering, and more. Tonight’s conversation falls along these lines.
Last week, a Texas-based biotech company, Colossal Biosciences, announced that it had taken a critical step closer to its goal of resurrecting a long-extinct species, the wooly mammoth. Colossal says that the purpose of its work, termed “de-extinction” is to “rebuild extinct species for today that will secure the health and biodiversity of our planet’s future. It is complex, expansive, evolving and entirely new.” This line of scientific inquiry is also sometimes referred to as “resurrection biology.”
The company says that to them, the task isn’t just about making a creature that is or resembles an extinct species. Rather, “it’s about merging the biodiversity of the past with the innovations of the present in an effort to create a more sustainable future.” To further explain what they’re up to, Colossal offers a new definition for de-extinction:
“The process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost lineage of core genes; engineering natural resistances; and enhancing adaptability that will allow it to thrive in today’s environment of climate change, dwindling resources, disease and human interference.”
A story in The Washington Post last week reported that Colossal “has produced a line of Asian elephant stem cells that can be coaxed to transform into other types of cells needed to reconstruct the extinct giant — or at a least a mammoth-like elephant designed to thrive in the cold. … For proponents, bringing back vanished animals is a chance to correct humanity’s role in the ongoing extinction crisis. Breakthroughs in their field, they say, may yield benefits for animals still with us, including endangered elephants.”
Last year, Colossal announced plans to “de-extinct” the dodo bird, or at least, a living replica of the species which has become synonymous with extinction — you know, dead as a dodo. Bringing back the dodo would be expensive business; the company needed an infusion of $150 million to keep the project going. And many millions more will have to be spent before the first newly engineered dodo ever hatches. Conservation groups argued last year that such resources might be better used to protect currently endangered species and to protect critical ecosystems.
That’s the kind of dilemma we’re going to wrestle with in our conversation this evening. As The Washington Post article on the mammoth project puts it, such research “raises hairy ethical questions.” Who decides what comes back? Where will the reborn species go? Could the money be better spent elsewhere? And how hard will “de-extinction,” as the revival efforts are known, be on the animals themselves? Do you see the benefits of this work? What could go wrong? And, should we be playing God in this way?
We’ll take this on in our discussion this evening. Join us for the conversation beginning at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford. And tell us which extinct species you’d like to see brought back!