Is it possible to clone extinct species

For one thing, mortality rates for cloned animals are initially very high. There are ethical concerns about producing animals with a high chance of early death or stress. Still, similar questions might be raised about producing livestock in general. And the success rates are increasing. In , scientists used cloned embryos to get one successful Dolly. Even so, the higher mortality rates mean that cloning remains very expensive. The only current productive use of animal cloning is for prize beef bulls, whose genetic stock is valuable to farmers.

Cloning wild or endangered animals would be even more expensive, as we have less information about them and fewer specimens to use as tests. But one area that might allow non-scientists to interact with clones is in tourism for wealthy individuals.

If you think your Instagram feed already is full of people showing off novel, specialised travel experiences, that will only increase, according to experts like Daniel Wright, tourism management lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and author of a paper on cloning and tourism. Jaded travellers might pay through the nose to hunt cloned animals in South Africa, eat cloned animals in Japan, or spot clones of endangered animals while on safari in the US. Cloning could make specialised travel experiences, like eating fugu in Japan, more accessible Credit: Getty Images.

Right now, adventurous eaters in Japan eat fugu although certain species are threatened by overfishing and despite the poisonous nature of these pufferfish. Controversially, the Namibian government auctions off several permits each year to hunt the endangered black rhino , arguing that the money is essential for conservation programmes and only non-breeding rhinos can be hunted.

Added to that, we now realise that all animals are a product of their DNA and of the environment in which they live, along with the interaction between the two. Created in a lab, nurtured in the womb of a modern elephant, and raised in a world that has changed radically since mammoths went extinct thousands of years ago, the experiences of this new-age pachyderm will be different to those of its Ice Age doppelganger… all of which will conspire to make it less similar to the original woolly mammoth.

But does this matter? Sadly or thankfully , a real-life Jurassic Park is out of the question. There are limitations on which species can undergo de-extinction.

Sometimes this comes from preserved museum specimens or from cells that have been collected from live animals and frozen away. Sometimes it can come from fossils. Dinosaurs famously went extinct 65 million years ago, so their DNA is lost forever. No DNA, no dinosaurs.

Apologies, Hollywood. Although it died out comparatively recently — a few hundred years ago — its final resting place, Mauritius, was simply too hot to preserve its DNA. There are lots of good reasons to bring back extinct animals. Woolly mammoths, for example, were gardeners.

They knocked down saplings, ate grass and fertilised the ground via their nutrient-rich dung. But when they disappeared, the gardening stopped, biodiversity plummeted and the lush mammoth steppe was replaced by species-poor tundra. Studies suggest that if large grazers were returned to the far north, biodiversity would increase again.

De-extinction provides a means to enhance biodiversity and help restore the health of ailing ecosystems. It could be a conservation tool, and by choosing to bring back animals that are genetically unique — like the gastric-brooding frog or the Tasmanian tiger a stripy, pouched, dog-like marsupial also known as the thylacine — we could replace not just twigs, but entire branches on the tree of life.

Then there are the benefits that humans could glean. The gastric-brooding frog somehow converted its stomach into a makeshift womb. If scientists could figure out the changes involved in this, it could lead to treatments for stomach ulcers or could help people recovering from stomach surgery. Every day, between 30 and species disappear from the face of our planet, and studies reveal that extinction rates today are 1, times higher than they were during pre-human times.

We live in a time of mass extinction , and de-extinction has been proposed as a key way to undo some of that harm. To reverse extinction would undoubtedly be a huge moment for the fields of biology and conservation, and a feat that could motivate future generations of scientists and wildlife defenders.

How many projects aimed at de-extinction are going on today. Are there people working on this in this way? Are these kinds of things going on? Instead, what we like to think of this is a separate umbrella term, which we call genetic rescue.

There are many genetic rescue projects that are going on. They have some incredible details of supercool projects that are going on right now involving things including the mammoth. This was great. They make a lot of black-footed ferrets in captivity, but when they are released back into the wild, they eat a prairie dog and they get plague and they die. That is not good news for black-footed ferrets. So the population is almost too small to survive. So Florida panthers got to be very small population, highly inbred, and only a few individuals, and they started to show signs of of this inbreeding.

So they had kinked tails, a crooked thing in their tail. They were making very few mobile sperm. They had heart defects. They were really susceptible to disease. And what people did was they took panthers from Texas, just the nearest population to Florida panthers, and introduced a few healthy individuals into Florida. So instead of going geographically, we go to a place called the Frozen Zoo in San Diego where before black-footed ferrets nearly went extinct, they captured some few individuals.

They took some cells, and they put them in the deep freeze. So now we have these living deep frozen cells from individuals who have different DNA sequences because they were alive before this near extinction event. Can we use those individuals and clone those individuals and introduce them to that population, providing an increase in diversity and giving them and giving them a chance at surviving?

Marshall Poe: Right. Because with these very small populations, cloning is not exactly what you need because that produces a copy. What you need is increased genetic diversity. They took frog DNA and they stuck it into other things. So why so far away in the evolutionary tree is a little weird, but whatever. But they were smashing things together, you know, filling in holes with different species, which is kind of crazy.

But, you know, what do we mean by de-extinction? Is it really to have a mammoth that we can look at and hug and maybe put in a zoo and maybe have kid rides on and stuff like that? Is there some ecological rationale for wanting to bring them back?

I think for some recently extinct species whose extinction might have thrown their community that they lived in out of balance, then maybe there is a reason to try to bring them back and to reestablish ecological connections that that existed prior to their disappearance. But then you have to ask yourself, do you really need that exact species, or could you use something in its iplace?

They want mammoths to be back in Pleistocene Park because they think mammoths play a really critical role in establishing this ecosystem just by wandering around and knocking down shrubs, just like elephants do. But do they actually need a mammoth, or could they use an elephant that maybe has been modified using gene editing technologies to be able to survive and even thrive in the cold habitat up in Siberia?

But if we could identify mutations in their DNA that would make them better able to survive in that environment, then maybe we could just create a cold adapted elephant. So if they were to succeed, maybe they would create a cold adapted elephant. So you have an elephant cell, mostly elephant, that has a bit of mammoth DNA in it.

Does that count as a de-extinction? To me, no, I guess. What do you think, Marshall? Is that a de-extinction? Marshall Poe: I would call it speciation or something like that. It reminds me of the process of speciation, where a new species emerges in a kind of natural way. I have to stop and ask you this question. What do you think of the metaphor of DNA as the blueprint for life?

In fact, a lot of what we look like is really based on that. If you want to know how important the DNA letters are in determining what somebody looks like, then just see identical twins. They look identical. They have the same DNA, but extend that a little bit and no identical twins as they get older, as they live different lives, and experience different things and have different illnesses and different stressors and different joys, they diverge in the way that they look and the way that they act.

This is because we are a combination of what is coded by our DNA and the environment in which we live. The same would be true for any clone. A clone is just an identical twin that happens not to be born at the same time. Technological hurdle, number whatever. Would it be a mammoth or will it be an elephant? And mom in this case is one hundred percent elephant.

Currently, without the ability to cryopreserve the cells of bird species and clone them later, there is no scientific failsafe for birds like there is for mammals in case of genetic bottlenecks or critical endangerment. However, Jensen is hoping a different emerging genetic technology could perform a similar role for endangered bird species. This one focuses not on creating an entire clone, but on altering what kinds of chicks an individual is producing.

That requires researchers to focus on birds' testes and ovaries, also called the gonads. Cloning a mammal involves inserting the DNA of one individual into one egg, and producing one offspring that is the genetic replica of the donor. Reseearchers refer to these hybrid animals as chimeras.

To make a chimera, researchers carefully insert PGCs from a donor into a host embryo as it is developing. If everything goes to plan, the host will grow up to become an adult that produces sperm or eggs containing the DNA of the donor. So, for instance, you might have a domestic rooster host who produces sperm with the DNA of a Greater Prairie-Chicken.

If the rooster were mated with a female Greater Prairie-Chicken, the pair could then produce Greater Prairie-Chicken chicks. This approach has the benefit that one host parent could theoretically produce many offspring with the DNA of a donor over the course of its lifetime, rather than the single individual that would be produced via cloning.

And, as long as researchers can cryopreserve these PGCs, this can still offer the benefit of bringing back DNA from a donor that died long ago. Researchers have made some progress, however, that makes Jensen and Novak hopeful that the technology could one day be used for conservation.

Most of the research thus far has involved domestic chickens. Several groups of researchers have successfully transferred PGCs from one breed of chicken into another, producing offspring with donor DNA.

Researchers have also used the technique to successfully produce Maya Ducks, Korean Pheasants, and even Houbara Bustards by mating chimera domestic chicken males to the females of those species.