This isn't really about de-extincting the thylacine or mammoth, of course. That's a great way for Colossal to sell it. Mostly this is a foot in the door for do

This isn't really about de-extincting the thylacine or mammoth, of course. That's a great way for Colossal to sell it. Mostly this is a foot in the door for doing the editing we will need to maintain ecosystems in the face of increasing global change. As it stands today, you can mostly do whatever you want to a plant. Edit its genes, make a new strain, sell it to farmers. The whole Monsanto thing. Animals are different. Legally and emotionally we're uncomfortable with introducing edited animals into the wild. That can't last. As an example, lobsters and sea-turtles both face the threat of total extinction as a result of warming oceans. Lobsters don't ovulate when it's too warm, sea-turtles don't produce males. We have to be able to change that. Some animals will need to be edited to survive. Evolution and selective breeding are much too slow and the food-chain is already getting pretty thin. So if you use the reviving of an extinct animal as an excuse, now you have a population of animals you're trying to revive, instead of a population you might be "polluting" with edited genes. You can prove the value of engineered animals and nobody's going to worry that your "mammoths" in the Arctic are somehow going to breed into the existing asiatic elephant population. Even more so with thylacines... they're not about to breed with dunnart rats.