Things to think about when making species un-extinct No.1

Is there a word that is the opposite of extinct?  Alive perhaps but then that’s the opposite of dead.  Being extinct is something more than just being dead.  Animals and plants can be dead but species become extinct, never to return like a Brontosaurus or a Dodo.  As we all know, the Dodo is a euphemism for being completely dead.

If there isn’t such a word, it looks like we’re going to need one soon as I’ve heard twice now that we are very close to bringing back animals from the long dead.  I don’t mean by running a flash of lightning through a couple of crocodile clips attached to their ears but by the re-sequencing of an extinct animal’s DNA and inserting it into the egg of a closely related but live species and so giving birth to a previously extinct animal.

I first heard about this at Thinking Digital 13 when Matt Ridley said that within ten years such things would be possible and that some kind of pigeon would probably be first.  I then heard about the same thing when watching a YouTube clip from Michael Archer, a palaeontologist who is working to bring back his favourite extinct animals, the Tasmanian tiger and the Gastric Brooding frog.

I’m not going to go into the ethics of all this nor into the mind-boggling complexity of making it happen.  I also have no intention of delving into why anyone should have a favourite extinct animal, let alone two but there are a couple of things that I would like to raise which I think are worth considering.

The first is that the scientists (mad or sane?) are trying to bring back a species using DNA sequences from preserved cells.  But animals are not just a single species but rather complex communities of living organisms.  Some are so called friendly, such as the gut bacteria while others are less so such as viruses and parasites.  Indeed as much as seventy per cent of the cells in the human body are not from the host human.

Bringing back to life the extinct animal using re-sequenced DNA therefore will only bring back the host and not the entire organism.  It may only be thirty per cent complete and without much of this other fauna and flora will not be able to live.  Species have grown up together over millions of years and have formed complex symbiotic relationships many of which are not understood.  When these species became extinct then so did all of the parasites and symbiotes if they were unique to it.  So to bring back the pigeon, the tiger and the frog we would need to bring back all of the creatures that contributed to its success.  To not do so would be to bring back something else.

So there you have it.  I said that I had a couple of things that were worth considering and will raise the other one once I have got my head around it.