Because bringing extinct species back to life only works in the cinema
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Jurassic Park has ruined us. It has been almost thirty years (the film is from 1993) that we are all convinced that it is possible to revive an extinct species from an ancient DNA fragment, even prehistoric, and multiplying it to recreate individuals in flesh, bone and claws. And today science tells us once again that this is not the case and that we were a bit gullible, taking for real something that was just science fiction.
Biodiversity
This is what the Tasmanian tiger was like: the animal now disappeared finds its colors
On August 16, the Texan biotech startup Colossal Biosciences announced that it will finance the thylacine “resurrection” project with 10 million dollars (Thylacinus cynocephalus), a marsupial carnivore with a dog-like appearance, better known as the “Tasmanian tiger” due to the black stripes on the back of the back. Leading the team that will try to revive the “tiger” in the next decade Andrew Paskprofessor of biosciences at the University of Melbourne, who first in 2017 sequenced the entire thylacine genome.
Hunted to extinction by man who considered it a pest for herding, the last known specimen of thylacine, Benjamin, died in 1936 at the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, while the last individual sighted in the wild is that killed on May 13, 1930 by Wilfred Batty, a farmer exasperated by the animal’s constant forays into his chicken coop.
To be honest it’s not the first time someone has tried to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger. In 1999 a similar project coordinated by Mike Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, failed due to the poor quality of the DNA available for experiments. But there is no doubt that the development of new techniques, first of all Crispr, a real genetic “scissor” capable of cutting and sewing pieces of DNAopened up perspectives that were unthinkable twenty years ago.
If speaking of “resurrection” is a journalistic simplification, too the correct technical term, “de-extinction”, is far from precise. When a species is extinct, it is forever extinct. Talking about de-extinction evokes the possibility of “going back” but, as the Guidelines of theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)no methodology, however advanced, is currently capable of creating a faithful copy of an extinct species and, at best, can produce something similar, a surrogate.
So what is the new ambitious “resurrection” plan? Use the thylacine genome, decoded in 2017, as an “instruction booklet” for the reconstruction of the species. Unfortunately, however, since it is DNA of very bad quality, as it is derived from museum samples, it is as if most of the pages were missing from the booklet and the rest were in poor condition. The solution? Copy the missing pieces from another “instruction booklet”, that of the thylacine’s closest relative, the numbat Myrmecobius fasciatus, a sort of marsupial anteater, small enough to fit in one hand and also at risk of extinction. The intention of the scientists would therefore be to obtain, starting from a first cell engineered in the laboratory, a real baby of (similar) thylacine.
