Friday, March 13, 2015

Resurrection Biology: Is It Possible to Bring Them Back?

       Extinct animals have always been an interest of biologists all over the world and the mystery behind them raises a lot of questions.  Recently there have been a lot of ideas about bringing extinct animals back to life, namely animals as small as passenger pigeons to the extreme woolly mammoths.  The ideas are here, but the technology to pull this off is years, even decades away.  There are a couple large issues with bringing these animals back to life.  Some include how will we be able to birth them and how will we make it so that cells in the lab can read the DNA we want them to read.

       DNA is very complicated and it has to be very carefully handled in a lab.  Scientists don't have too much of a problem finding or reading the DNA, or even making DNA.  A full length of mammoth DNA can be made with a lot of time, effort, and money but it's not impossible with what we have today.  The real problem, as previously mentioned, is getting a living cell to read the DNA made in the lab.  Folding the DNA into chromosomes is an arduous task and it has to be done so precisely that it's near impossible to get perfect.  The only thing that can fold DNA perfectly every time is a cell and until we can somehow get man-made DNA into a cell and have the cell fold it for us, we need properly preserved cells with intact chromosomes.  Another obstacle is developing the embryo.  Scientists are going to need a lot of surrogate mothers and having animals give birth to sick or dead babies can be physically and emotionally draining for them, especially elephants that would be surrogate mothers for potential mammoths.  

       I personally do not think the 'bringing extinct species back to life' thing is a good idea.  The process is elaborate and expensive as it is, and then once the animal is brought back, then what?  How will it survive?  How will it reproduce?  I don't think there is any way that a mammoth could live on the planet anymore given the environmental conditions, let alone have a mammoth live where elephants currently live.  There must be some animals that could thrive in certain locations and I do think bringing animals back that humans killed off would be interesting in theory, but in practice I don't think it's worth it for humans, animals, or Mother Nature.

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