28 ms·

Can Genetic Engineering Bring Back Extinct Animals?

44 points by sethbannon 11y ago

tristanj 11y ago
Genetic engineering can't bring back most extinct animals. DNA molecules have a half life of around ~500 years and samples older than a few hundred thousand years will have too many errors to recreate. Better statistical techniques will push this bound but it's hard to argue against physics. It's estimated that DNA older than 20 million years old will be fully unrecoverable. Notice how all the author's examples are recently extinct species, not ancient ones. I guess they don't mention this because it doesn't fit with their worldview. Some sources: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA
- giarc 11y ago
  Could you not produce viable samples by collecting multiple copies of the DNA and overlapping them, thus removing the errors that would likely happen at random locations?
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    > Better statistical techniques will push this bound That's what he meant by statistical techniques, we don't currently read a full "stream" even with brand new DNA, we smash it to bits then read those and have the computers put them back together. At a certain point though what's left is too garbled or in too small sequences so that there isn't enough overlap that you can't put humpty back together again :).
  - searine 11y ago
    Not likely. Dude to the chemistry of nucleotides, they can degrade in a particular pattern that obscures the ancestral allele. For example the deamination of cytosine to thymine can leave us with an ambiguity in what in our read for the correct nucleotide is. Was it thymine? Or was it cytosine that degraded to thymine? That means for literally 50% of the genome we have a huge ambiguity and few ways to tell what it really is. We can use the ancestral allele from a nearby extant species, but then we miss out on all the extinct variation (which is the important stuff). We can try to increase coverage of the ancient genome to capture loci where cytosines haven't deaminated, but thats tough for a dozen reasons, and in the end you'll still have no confidence in 25% of the genome. We can get very close to a full ancient genome, but never 100%. Maybe through transgenics, selective breeding, and ancient sequencing we can re-create ancient species, but we will never make them exactly as they once were.
    - meric 11y ago
      we will never make them exactly as they once were And maybe that could be good enough and better than not doing it at all...
  - mehwoot 11y ago
    Yes, but with a half life of 500 years, the amount of information you have halves every 500 years you go back. At some point there just isn't enough information to go viably go back further.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Has there been much work on cloning endangered species? I guess resurrecting extinct species would be "cooler", but helping endangered species would be less controversial.
- Frqy3 11y ago
  Apart from very close species (like incubating passenger pigeon DNA in a fantail pigeon host), is it possible to recreate say a woolly mammoth even assuming you can perfectly reconstruct the DNA itself? That is, how much of an organism is encoded in the DNA and how much in the mother's body? And yes, this question is derived from GEB[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
27182818284 11y ago
Out of curiosity, does anyone know anyone else in real life that is not open to the idea of bringing back some extinct species? I noticed this recently. Not a single person in my social network is against the idea of trying to clone a mammoth or trying to clone an extinct cat or dinosaur. There is some hesitancy when you bring up possibly reviving old bacteria, but that's it that I've noticed.
- timClicks 11y ago
  There is a little bit of a safety concern with some of the larger species of New Zealand moa. They're massive and New Zealanders currently don't really have anything that can harm them in the bush (e.g. no big cats, bears, snakes). One of the proponents of the project (http://bringbackmoa.org/ http://bringbackmoa.org/) has stated that he's not interested at de-extinction of the larger species (http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10216641/Time-to-bring-back-the-moa http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10216641/Time-to-bring-back-...).
- macspoofing 11y ago
  >Not a single person in my social network is against the idea of trying to clone a mammoth or trying to clone an extinct cat or dinosaur. What are you going to do with them? Neither a T-Rex nor a Mammoth would do well in the wild and even if you put the issues of environmental difference between the distant past and today, you may be disrupting existing large fauna, which is already on the brink of extinction due to human activity. If that's not the case, you'll be left with the ethics of zoos and animal rights.
  - 27182818284 11y ago
    >If that's not the case, you'll be left with the ethics of zoos and animal rights. This is kind of to my point. Nobody I know has raised objects like that, and animal rights is largely PR based anyway. (E.g., politicians eating baby elephant but social media upset about Cecil.) Nobody I've talked to has said something like, "We shouldn't do it for ethical reasons and they are..." which I find interesting and why I broached the topic.
  - 11y ago
cpeterso 11y ago
Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation have a deextinction research program called Revive & Restore: http://longnow.org/revive/ http://longnow.org/revive/
BurningFrog 11y ago
Bringing back extinct species isn't cool. You know what's cool? Designing brand new species in DNA!
ams6110 11y ago
Changes are now happening so quickly that they appear to be driving some species towards extinction because they can’t adapt fast enough. Well, yeah -- that's how natural selection works.
vdutta 11y ago
It's a well known fact that most ecosystems are very delicately balanced. Introducing new species can often have devastating effects on existing ones. So even if we did resurrect extinct species, they may have to remain domesticated, as our toys.

44 points by sethbannon 11y ago

Genetic engineering can't bring back most extinct animals. DNA molecules have a half life of around ~500 years and samples older than a few hundred thousand years will have too many errors to recreate. Better statistical techniques will push this bound but it's hard to argue against physics. It's estimated that DNA older than 20 million years old will be fully unrecoverable. Notice how all the author's examples are recently extinct species, not ancient ones. I guess they don't mention this because it doesn't fit with their worldview. Some sources: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA

giarc 11y ago
Could you not produce viable samples by collecting multiple copies of the DNA and overlapping them, thus removing the errors that would likely happen at random locations?
- noir_lord 11y ago
  > Better statistical techniques will push this bound That's what he meant by statistical techniques, we don't currently read a full "stream" even with brand new DNA, we smash it to bits then read those and have the computers put them back together. At a certain point though what's left is too garbled or in too small sequences so that there isn't enough overlap that you can't put humpty back together again :).
- searine 11y ago
  Not likely. Dude to the chemistry of nucleotides, they can degrade in a particular pattern that obscures the ancestral allele. For example the deamination of cytosine to thymine can leave us with an ambiguity in what in our read for the correct nucleotide is. Was it thymine? Or was it cytosine that degraded to thymine? That means for literally 50% of the genome we have a huge ambiguity and few ways to tell what it really is. We can use the ancestral allele from a nearby extant species, but then we miss out on all the extinct variation (which is the important stuff). We can try to increase coverage of the ancient genome to capture loci where cytosines haven't deaminated, but thats tough for a dozen reasons, and in the end you'll still have no confidence in 25% of the genome. We can get very close to a full ancient genome, but never 100%. Maybe through transgenics, selective breeding, and ancient sequencing we can re-create ancient species, but we will never make them exactly as they once were.
  - meric 11y ago
    we will never make them exactly as they once were And maybe that could be good enough and better than not doing it at all...
- mehwoot 11y ago
  Yes, but with a half life of 500 years, the amount of information you have halves every 500 years you go back. At some point there just isn't enough information to go viably go back further.
cpeterso 11y ago
Has there been much work on cloning endangered species? I guess resurrecting extinct species would be "cooler", but helping endangered species would be less controversial.
Frqy3 11y ago
Apart from very close species (like incubating passenger pigeon DNA in a fantail pigeon host), is it possible to recreate say a woolly mammoth even assuming you can perfectly reconstruct the DNA itself? That is, how much of an organism is encoded in the DNA and how much in the mother's body? And yes, this question is derived from GEB[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

27182818284 11y ago

Out of curiosity, does anyone know anyone else in real life that is not open to the idea of bringing back some extinct species? I noticed this recently. Not a single person in my social network is against the idea of trying to clone a mammoth or trying to clone an extinct cat or dinosaur. There is some hesitancy when you bring up possibly reviving old bacteria, but that's it that I've noticed.

timClicks 11y ago
There is a little bit of a safety concern with some of the larger species of New Zealand moa. They're massive and New Zealanders currently don't really have anything that can harm them in the bush (e.g. no big cats, bears, snakes). One of the proponents of the project (http://bringbackmoa.org/ http://bringbackmoa.org/) has stated that he's not interested at de-extinction of the larger species (http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10216641/Time-to-bring-back-the-moa http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10216641/Time-to-bring-back-...).
macspoofing 11y ago
>Not a single person in my social network is against the idea of trying to clone a mammoth or trying to clone an extinct cat or dinosaur. What are you going to do with them? Neither a T-Rex nor a Mammoth would do well in the wild and even if you put the issues of environmental difference between the distant past and today, you may be disrupting existing large fauna, which is already on the brink of extinction due to human activity. If that's not the case, you'll be left with the ethics of zoos and animal rights.
- 27182818284 11y ago
  >If that's not the case, you'll be left with the ethics of zoos and animal rights. This is kind of to my point. Nobody I know has raised objects like that, and animal rights is largely PR based anyway. (E.g., politicians eating baby elephant but social media upset about Cecil.) Nobody I've talked to has said something like, "We shouldn't do it for ethical reasons and they are..." which I find interesting and why I broached the topic.
- 11y ago

cpeterso 11y ago

Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation have a deextinction research program called Revive & Restore: http://longnow.org/revive/ http://longnow.org/revive/

BurningFrog 11y ago

Bringing back extinct species isn't cool. You know what's cool? Designing brand new species in DNA!

ams6110 11y ago

Changes are now happening so quickly that they appear to be driving some species towards extinction because they can’t adapt fast enough. Well, yeah -- that's how natural selection works.

vdutta 11y ago

It's a well known fact that most ecosystems are very delicately balanced. Introducing new species can often have devastating effects on existing ones. So even if we did resurrect extinct species, they may have to remain domesticated, as our toys.