De-extinction company sets its next (first?) target: The thylacine

We killed the last thylacine about a century ago. Can we correct that mistake?

Read the whole story

 

[The Dark]

End goal: extinct animals as pets for billionaires. I jest (hopefully). But first, you absolutely must let me show you my pterodactyl collection!

Re-constructed thylacines were one of the the great little weird details in William Gibson's "The Peripheral," two of them being owned by the dilletante son of a Russian-British mafia boss who spent his time mostly wasting dad's money on weird shit as a hobby. I swear to God, the man is a prophet, and a master of the weird detail you remember years later when fiction becomes reality.

"The Peripheral" was published 12 years after efforts to bring back the thylacine began the first time. I'd argue for it being "observer of weird news stories" more than "prophet," at least for this case.

 

[The Dark]

If they are successful, will the environment their releasing the thylacine into adapt to having them returned? Mammoths for instance were large animals who packed on weight to survive the harsh Ice Age environment, but thylacine were predators. Will there be counter to them not wiping out animal life where their released?

Who can predict the future? It should be a return to normalcy, but the unexpected does tend to happen. Hopefully the government will take a cautious approach to reintroduction, the nice thing about predators is there generally aren't many of them compared to their outsized effect, not only would we be able to see something has gone wrong early... well we already drove them to extinction once by accident, I can't imagine it will be harder to do it again 100 years later & on purpose.

Well, the last time was on purpose too.

But predators tend to be self limiting. Once they run out of prey they stop breeding. The problem will be if the reintroduced predator goes back to effectively hunting its former prey animals while ignoring invasive species.

Good news! One of the thylacine's major former prey animals, the Tasmanian emu, is also extinct, so it's more likely to go after invasive species.

 

[CrystalCowboy]

bring back the hula hoop.

A more inspiring goal: Bring back the American Chestnut tree.
The American Chestnut Foundation has found that adding a single gene - for oxalate oxidase - to the American chestnut can give it resistance to chestnut blight.

 

[andygates]

William Gibson called it....

I'd say Michael Crichton did a better job at prognostication.

Yeah but ultra-rare engineered beasties as luxury pets for oligarchs is a classic theme.

"Nice owl. Is it real?"

Anyway, the lab name Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research Lab (TIGRR), is too awesome.

 

[Snark218]

End goal: extinct animals as pets for billionaires. I jest (hopefully). But first, you absolutely must let me show you my pterodactyl collection!

Re-constructed thylacines were one of the the great little weird details in William Gibson's "The Peripheral," two of them being owned by the dilletante son of a Russian-British mafia boss who spent his time mostly wasting dad's money on weird shit as a hobby. I swear to God, the man is a prophet, and a master of the weird detail you remember years later when fiction becomes reality.

"The Peripheral" was published 12 years after efforts to bring back the thylacine began the first time. I'd argue for it being "observer of weird news stories" more than "prophet," at least for this case.

I feel like "de-extincted thylacine as pointless billionaire toy" still has that ring of pre-reality.

 

[Mandella]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

I think part of the problem is that most of those absolutely dumbarse quotes were given such a great delivery by the incomparable Jeff Goldblum. Most anybody else would have made them seem (as they were) whiney contrarianism, but Goldblum made them profound.

And of course, for the sake of the movie we all knew that the Park was going to have a disaster, and not just run on for decades entertaining children watching T-Rex feeding time.

 

[Juvba Fnakix]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

OK, spend half a second imagining what would happen if thousands of thylacines start terrorising Tasmania: people with guns shoot them. The government puts a bounty on them. They promptly go extinct. There is experimental evidence to back this up. I would expect the same thing to work with mammoths, velociraptors and T Rexes. If they were considering bringing back an extinct ant then I would be worried.

 

[Snark218]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

I think part of the problem is that most of those absolutely dumbarse quotes were given such a great delivery by the incomparable Jeff Goldblum. Most anybody else would have made them seem (as they were) whiney contrarianism, but Goldblum made them profound.

And of course, for the sake of the movie we all knew that the Park was going to have a disaster, and not just run on for decades entertaining children watching T-Rex feeding time.

Jeff Goldblum is at least a two-time winner of the Raul Julia Award For Committing To Stupid Lines With His Whole Heart.

 

[The Dark]

End goal: extinct animals as pets for billionaires. I jest (hopefully). But first, you absolutely must let me show you my pterodactyl collection!

Re-constructed thylacines were one of the the great little weird details in William Gibson's "The Peripheral," two of them being owned by the dilletante son of a Russian-British mafia boss who spent his time mostly wasting dad's money on weird shit as a hobby. I swear to God, the man is a prophet, and a master of the weird detail you remember years later when fiction becomes reality.

"The Peripheral" was published 12 years after efforts to bring back the thylacine began the first time. I'd argue for it being "observer of weird news stories" more than "prophet," at least for this case.

I feel like "de-extincted thylacine as pointless billionaire toy" still has that ring of pre-reality.

I suppose. Maybe I'm just too much of a purveyor of weird news, because to me it looks like taking the 2002 thylacine efforts and Pablo Escobar's importation of hippos to Colombia in the 1970s (or similar "rich people do stupid things with exotic animals" stories) and mashing them together.

 

[terrydactyl]

One of the most noticeable things about Tasmania is its staggering rates of road kill, even on wilderness roads in the barely inhabited West I saw dead native animals on the roadside every kilometer or so. I wish any hypothetical Thylacine's the best of luck surviving there.

They should work on birds first to avoid the embryo implanting issues. Bring back Moas and Haast's Eagles to New Zealand.

Passenger pigeons.

Problem for passenger pigeons, they needed large flocks for reproduction behavior. Humans didn't so much kill them all off as disrupt the large forests and large numbers needed to sustain the population. That's a species you won't easily reintroduce.

 

[andygates]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

OK, spend half a second imagining what would happen if thousands of thylacines start terrorising Tasmania: people with guns shoot them. The government puts a bounty on them. They promptly go extinct. There is experimental evidence to back this up. I would expect the same thing to work with mammoths, velociraptors and T Rexes. If they were considering bringing back an extinct ant then I would be worried.

For all that I want a Jurassic World that is actually a world full of dino-beasties (because it would *rock*), yeah. The bison scene from Prey just reminded me how efficient people with a quota can truly be.

 

[Mandella]

One of the most noticeable things about Tasmania is its staggering rates of road kill, even on wilderness roads in the barely inhabited West I saw dead native animals on the roadside every kilometer or so. I wish any hypothetical Thylacine's the best of luck surviving there.

They should work on birds first to avoid the embryo implanting issues. Bring back Moas and Haast's Eagles to New Zealand.

I don't know if bringing back the Thylacine is the best counter to it, but what you are describing is evidence that there are no top predators in the ecology. They have a population explosion of small critters that end up in the roads.

Also, you rarely see a predator such as a cougar or coyote hit by a car in the road. Their instincts seem to keep them out of trouble there.

 

[Bygons]

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[Snark218]

End goal: extinct animals as pets for billionaires. I jest (hopefully). But first, you absolutely must let me show you my pterodactyl collection!

Re-constructed thylacines were one of the the great little weird details in William Gibson's "The Peripheral," two of them being owned by the dilletante son of a Russian-British mafia boss who spent his time mostly wasting dad's money on weird shit as a hobby. I swear to God, the man is a prophet, and a master of the weird detail you remember years later when fiction becomes reality.

"The Peripheral" was published 12 years after efforts to bring back the thylacine began the first time. I'd argue for it being "observer of weird news stories" more than "prophet," at least for this case.

I feel like "de-extincted thylacine as pointless billionaire toy" still has that ring of pre-reality.

I suppose. Maybe I'm just too much of a purveyor of weird news, because to me it looks like taking the 2002 thylacine efforts and Pablo Escobar's importation of hippos to Colombia in the 1970s (or similar "rich people do stupid things with exotic animals" stories) and mashing them together.

Christ, the hippos. I remember reading about that. The kind of thing that can only be done by a man who can clap twice and have a pile of cocaine the size of a termite mound deposited on any flat surface that's handy.

 

[Snark218]

One of the most noticeable things about Tasmania is its staggering rates of road kill, even on wilderness roads in the barely inhabited West I saw dead native animals on the roadside every kilometer or so. I wish any hypothetical Thylacine's the best of luck surviving there.

They should work on birds first to avoid the embryo implanting issues. Bring back Moas and Haast's Eagles to New Zealand.

I don't know if bringing back the Thylacine is the best counter to it, but what you are describing is evidence that there are no top predators in the ecology. They have a population explosion of small critters that end up in the roads.

Also, you rarely see a predator such as a cougar or coyote hit by a car in the road. Their instincts seem to keep them out of trouble there.

Well, yeah, coyotes tend to get blown up by Acme rockets or run off cliffs by roadrunners.

 

[Deleted member 764661]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

True, "Science" can't tell us anything about how we should live our lives. But *scientists* (i.e. the humans that actually perform science) should absolutely be concerned with the ethical implications of their work.

 

[21five]

Even if they manage to make one thylacine, is there enough genetic material around to salvage and source from to create a healthy gene pool for a populace to reproduce from, or will they forever be a line of cloned reproductions?

At least with mammoths, there has been enough frozen samples found in the Arctic over the decades that I believe a sizable amount of genetic diversity would readily available.

To refer back to the article we're commenting on, there are far more samples of thylacine because many of the last of them died in zoos within the last century or so.

Not many, though. The last Thylacine died in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936, three years after the last one was seen in the wild. The methods of preservation of the different samples, including in formaldehyde, has caused challenges for DNA-related Thylacine projects in the past. They may have found a way past this particular issue, though.

 

[CraigJ ✅]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

Though when Hammond brought up bringing back an extinct Condor, Ian countered.

“ No, no, listen, this isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation or, uh, the building of a dam. Dinosaurs, uh, had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.”

Yeah, but that quote is also only sort of correct. I mean, sure, asteroids are natural, but it's not like evolution just decided to kill all the dinosaurs. They might not have survived the cooling, drying and the ice ages, etc. but I think it's pretty definitive that the demise of the dinosaurs was directly related to a big asteroid which by definition is an external influence, not unlike human technological ecological destruction.

Evolution doesn't decide anything, that would be Intelligent Design.

A decision tree does not imply sentience.

 

[Moedius]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

I think part of the problem is that most of those absolutely dumbarse quotes were given such a great delivery by the incomparable Jeff Goldblum. Most anybody else would have made them seem (as they were) whiney contrarianism, but Goldblum made them profound.

And of course, for the sake of the movie we all knew that the Park was going to have a disaster, and not just run on for decades entertaining children watching T-Rex feeding time.

Jeff Goldblum is at least a two-time winner of the Raul Julia Award For Committing To Stupid Lines With His Whole Heart.

But he still falls short of the all-time award winner for sheer volume of whole-hearted stupid lines, Nick Cage.

 

[lasertekk]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

I don’t have an issue with science being used to correct a man-made mistake.

 

[AdrianS]

Even if they manage to make one thylacine, is there enough genetic material around to salvage and source from to create a healthy gene pool for a populace to reproduce from, or will they forever be a line of cloned reproductions?

At least with mammoths, there has been enough frozen samples found in the Arctic over the decades that I believe a sizable amount of genetic diversity would readily available.

To refer back to the article we're commenting on, there are far more samples of thylacine because many of the last of them died in zoos within the last century or so.

Not many, though. The last Thylacine died in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936, three years after the last one was seen in the wild. The methods of preservation of the different samples, including in formaldehyde, has caused challenges for DNA-related Thylacine projects in the past. They may have found a way past this particular issue, though.

I read sometime in the last year that "they" had discovered a Thylacine pelt in good condition, and were hopeful about getting some useable DNA from it.

I can't remember who "they" were.

 

[Deleted member 221201]

If you raised a human absent any cultural context, you'd be resurrecting the species, but nothing that really characterises who we are. We're so defined by out culture and cultural memory that it's hard to imagine what a human blank slate would think or act like.

To what extent would this be a problem with an animal like the Thylacine? I know that many animals pass down ideas between generations, Crows definitely do this, but I don't know how common this is or whether it's a relevant idea at all for this animal. I think it must be to some extent though?

They will communicate via song

Rising up, I'm back on my feet
Did my time, took my chances
DNA editing bought me back to my feet
Just a thylacine and it's will to survive


Eye of the Tasmanian Tiger

 

[hestermofet]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

When you completely divorce science from ethics, no, scientists cannot be trusted. Just like any other organized human activity such a public health initiatives, infrastructure projects, IT database projects, and even farming.

The quote is not about distrust of science. The quote is about keeping in mind the ethical impact of what you do, no matter what it is that you do. And the quote is about no, other goals such as money and fame do not trump ethics. Ethics is always the most important goal.

I guess a reminder that the main adult heroes in the movie are all scientists is in order, and the most insufferable character is a lawyer whose only goal is CYA over legal liability. i.e someone who's constantly concerned about "is this something we should do?" but for the wrong reasons.

But sure, completely miss the point if you wish in order to dunk on something you don't like.

 

[Sheep Disorder]

I mean, good luck. We’ll either end up with a well meaning failed experiment, a successful, historic achievement (whose ethics will certainly be debated for decades I bet), or mutant super intelligent marsupials that replace us on the food chain. Sounds like fun!

It will be failure.

You need sufficient genetic diversity to actually make a species last longer than several generations before inbreeding does them in. We don't have any thylacine alive today. Even if you produced massive numbers of them through cloning, the genetic diversity isn't there.

So I literally do not see the point in trying to bring back a recently extinct species, let alone something like a Mammoth, which will suffer from the same lack of genetic diversity issue as any other species that can't maintain it (like the Cheetah, for example, which is expected to be extinct within a century or less specifically because of a lack of genetic diversity to the point that they don't need to do tissue matching for blood transfusions between them).

This is ALL about assuaging the guilt people feel over man's general stupidity, and I expect it will be a horror show all around when despite our best efforts, we discover we're not capable of imitating mother nature on that scale. Caged, poked, prodded, studied, and then ultimately, going extinct again isn't my idea of helping a species.

It's estimated that of all the different kinds of life Earth has ever supported, 99.9% of it has gone extinct already, mostly caused by five mass extinction events of natural causes. Mankind has already created the sixth mass extinction event through greed, ignorance and stupidity, and it will not be stopped. In fact, we're most likely to make it far worse in the decades ahead, which, because of our violent, tribal nature, is very likely to include US among the victims.

So, this is just a pathetic, worthless effort so that some people can feel self-righteous for a short period of time before they witness the same tragedy that man witnessed before and whatever they "resurrect" slips back into the mists of time once more.

In the article, the larger number of thylacine samples in museums was an indicator of the genetic diversity of the population. One would think that's on the minds of these groups (as it is with every conservation effort of nearly-extinct animals). But if one is gene editing to create animals it seems reasonable to believe that one can impose a certain amount of variability.

There could also be some additional diversity because there are samples from at least three distinct populations. The majority are Tasmanian thylacines, but there are apparently also some Western Australian and Eastern Australian samples. They're much older, since the mainland population seems to have been locally extinct before the first European ship visited Australia, but there was enough for a study of mitochondrial differences between the three populations to be published a few years ago.

Number of samples is utterly worthless here. It does not matter how many samples exist if it is impossible to recover the complete genomic sequences including the methylation (will vary between tissues, age etc.) and histones/chromatin. Many samples are stored in formaldehyde that makes DNA sequence recovery very difficult or impossible. Sequence alone is insufficient because the genes have to get probably expressed (many diseases are known to be a result of when this fails). Further that DNA is within chromosomes that needs to be packaged correctly.

So far we we have limited success making synthetic cellular organisms - bacteria (since ~2010). More complex organism are still a dream. There is too much unknown like creating chromosomes since that requires packaging of the DNA with the correct histones to get a chromatin and then the full chromosome. CRISPR technology would need to millions locations to convert a chromosome from one species to another. It also assumes that chromatin and histone structures will be correct.

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

I think part of the problem is that most of those absolutely dumbarse quotes were given such a great delivery by the incomparable Jeff Goldblum. Most anybody else would have made them seem (as they were) whiney contrarianism, but Goldblum made them profound.

And of course, for the sake of the movie we all knew that the Park was going to have a disaster, and not just run on for decades entertaining children watching T-Rex feeding time.

Jeff Goldblum is at least a two-time winner of the Raul Julia Award For Committing To Stupid Lines With His Whole Heart.

But he still falls short of the all-time award winner for sheer volume of whole-hearted stupid lines, Nick Cage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zySHepF04c

If this ever fails to make me smile, i will truly have become broken

 

[kd1sq]

Looking at human nature and the way we behave, the common way we react (especially in males) to certain stimuli, I'd say that's very, very probable.

What we really need are nonhuman observers - we're blind to a lot of our own programming.

If successful, this will definitively answer if behavioral instincts are encoded in the DNA.

 

[Moedius]

I apologize in advance if it's a dumb question as I'm pretty well over my head with this stuff, but I've recently begun reading a book on genetics and epigenetics, like soft inheritance via chemical tags. Maybe once I've worked my way through it I'll have a better idea, but when an animal is cloned, is the epigenome factored into the process at all, or is it just not a consideration, or is it just like a 'reset to 0' type scenario?

It seems like it's still a very new area of study and I haven't quite wrapped my head around how impactful it is when taken as a the whole; with so many of these tiny little changes it seems like it could hugely influence the success or survivability of a cloned, extinct species.

 

[Moedius]

Jeff Goldblum is at least a two-time winner of the Raul Julia Award For Committing To Stupid Lines With His Whole Heart.

But he still falls short of the all-time award winner for sheer volume of whole-hearted stupid lines, Nick Cage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zySHepF04c

If this ever fails to make me smile, i will truly have become broken

Amen! I don't think he ever really stopped working altogether, but I've been really happy to see him having something of a renaissance in recent years.

And also this: https://youtu.be/Xf3OgWVkzlI

 

[brionl]

Has anyone ever edited the gene sequence of one animal to create another? Horses and donkeys are so closely related the can breed. It seems to me that one might want to just try making a horse from a donkey to know if that process works (or any other closely-related animals). After all, we have lots of horses we can compare the newly-created animal to. At the very least, we have lots of viable surrogates to carry the calf and remove a lot of the unknowns.

Well, actually...
A calf is an infant bovine. You're looking for a foal here.
Now don't you feel foalish.

 

[21five]

It's not every day I get to comment on an article about Tasmania; having grown up there and visited earlier this year for a few months I feel like I can provide some additional context to some of the comments and the article itself.

Tasmania is one of the spiritual homes of the modern Green movement (and home to the world's first green political party), primarily because of the efforts to save the Franklin River by stopping the construction of the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam in the early 1980s and the (failed) efforts to save Lake Pedder by stopping the construction of the Gordon Dam in the early 1970s.

There is an unusual degree of willingness to consider "rehabilitating" ecosystems to their former glory, and this has become embedded in government management philosophy. Indeed, some modern cultural heritage in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area has been destroyed in order to return the area to its "natural" state. There is an ongoing campaign to drain Lake Pedder and restore it to its state from the early 1970s.

The Thylacine has shifted from an embarrassing story I grew up with about Tasmanians inadvertently killing off a unique animal (due to the impact on commercial sheep farming), to an emblem of the state (the government uses the Thylacine as part of its logo which means it appears on signage, car license plates and government paperwork; it was already on the coat of arms).

Tasmania has excellent bio-security protection, in part due to being an island, and in part due to good management at ports (the sniffer dogs at the airport looking for fruit, not drugs, are a good example). There was an issue two decades ago in relation to red foxes potentially infiltrating Tasmania which led to an expensive effort to prevent them gaining hold, which appears to have been successful.

That said, Tasmania does have some challenges in native animal populations, most notably Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease (DTFD) which has decimated the Tasmanian Devil population (on top of the roadkill mentioned repeatedly in the comments!). Some populations have been isolated on islands to protect them, which has been successful to date. There is a significant risk that this could spread to other animals, including any released Thylacines.

I would also note the voice of traditional land managers, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, is critical to this conversation, and I would note that their voice has become much stronger in Tasmania over the past generation or so, especially in land management conversations (including in the World Heritage Area). There is deep cultural heritage across Tasmania dating back tens of thousands of years.

There's a lot of work to be done before returning Thylacines to the wild in Tasmania, and the potential for unintended consequences is quite high. Let's not forget that this is the home of half a million people, not a deserted island wilderness. I feel that there is a lot of unresolved guilt and shame in Tasmania about the recent past generally, and this type of project (like draining Pedder) may serve a deeper emotional purpose in trying to undo past mistakes.

 

[Wickwick]

Has anyone ever edited the gene sequence of one animal to create another? Horses and donkeys are so closely related the can breed. It seems to me that one might want to just try making a horse from a donkey to know if that process works (or any other closely-related animals). After all, we have lots of horses we can compare the newly-created animal to. At the very least, we have lots of viable surrogates to carry the calf and remove a lot of the unknowns.

Well, actually...
A calf is an infant bovine. You're looking for a foal here.
Now don't you feel foalish.

Nice pun. But I take a bit of pride in knowing next to nothing about animal husbandry and it’s vocabulary.

 

[jazzylarry]

William Gibson called it....

Try [urhttps://www.amazon.com/Jurassic-Park-Novel-Michael-Crichton/dp/0345538986]Michael Crichton[/url].

 

[amishistheanswer]

I'm glad to hear that there's an easier target than mammoths! Yet mammoths have the advantage of being completely awesome, and therefore a goal everyone could get behind. Thylacines sound like a kind of amino acid. Yet we've got to start undoing the Sixth Extinction somewhere. Up next, passenger pigeons!

This is rich.. undoing it? We intend to add 25-30% more people to the planet in the next 40 years and already 40-50% of the entire output of the planet is going to one species who has limitless greed.

I've tried to debate here and elsewhere and never have I seen even a minority of people agree that balance with nature matters, we as a species intend to drive everything else extinct as fast as we can and then ourselves shortly after. I don't need your acceptance of this since every trend and every data point shows I'm right. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

 

[olePigeon]

I vote for the Haast's Eagle next for de-extinction. I can't foresee any issues.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Has anyone ever edited the gene sequence of one animal to create another? Horses and donkeys are so closely related the can breed. It seems to me that one might want to just try making a horse from a donkey to know if that process works (or any other closely-related animals). After all, we have lots of horses we can compare the newly-created animal to. At the very least, we have lots of viable surrogates to carry the calf and remove a lot of the unknowns.

Well, actually...
A calf is an infant bovine. You're looking for a foal here.
Now don't you feel foalish.

Nice pun. But I take a bit of pride in knowing next to nothing about animal husbandry and it’s vocabulary.

With that pride you could compete with the Tiger King for exotic pet of the year award...

 

[13485]

But fundamentally, it's about developing products for which there's obviously no market: species that no longer exist.

I'll bet there are any number of big game hunters who would pay big bucks for a crack at putting a mammoth head on the wall of their den.

Sadly, this is so true.

My initial response is "Hell no." But let's be fair--hunters can only travel on foot and only use stone-tipped spears. Then it might be fair.

 

[jazzylarry]

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

That quote from Jurassic Park sounds so deceptively reasonable, but it's actually misguided. The role of science actually is precisely to figure out what we *could* do, to stick to the facts. It's up to society and politics to figure out what we *should* do, to set the boundaries and targets for science.

For example, science can never tell us whether we should shoot for a 1.5 or 2 degree target for global warming. Science can establish what the likely impacts of these targets would be, but actually setting the target is up to politicians (i.e. the rest of us) because it involves trade-offs with how we spend our resources and how much we value things like working ecosystems, human health, etc. And science can't help us with value judgements.

David Hume had this all figured out in 1740 (the "is-ought problem") but it's still not generally understood, as evidenced from the popularity of the quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Thank you for a well-thought out post. Way, way, way too many people take the throwaway lines from that movie as some sort of serious insight. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to name a movie that's done more damage to science than Jurassic Park. It's primary legacy is reinforcing the notion that scientists simply can't be trusted.

The story is the story, the science discussed was what was interesting to me. As for scientists can't be trusted, they were henchmen who did what they were paid to do, like any other antagonist in any other plot line. There just wasn't a "hero" scientist to save the day via science.

 

[llanitedave]

I mean, good luck. We’ll either end up with a well meaning failed experiment, a successful, historic achievement (whose ethics will certainly be debated for decades I bet), or mutant super intelligent marsupials that replace us on the food chain. Sounds like fun!

It will be failure.

You need sufficient genetic diversity to actually make a species last longer than several generations before inbreeding does them in. We don't have any thylacine alive today. Even if you produced massive numbers of them through cloning, the genetic diversity isn't there.

So I literally do not see the point in trying to bring back a recently extinct species, let alone something like a Mammoth, which will suffer from the same lack of genetic diversity issue as any other species that can't maintain it (like the Cheetah, for example, which is expected to be extinct within a century or less specifically because of a lack of genetic diversity to the point that they don't need to do tissue matching for blood transfusions between them).

This is ALL about assuaging the guilt people feel over man's general stupidity, and I expect it will be a horror show all around when despite our best efforts, we discover we're not capable of imitating mother nature on that scale. Caged, poked, prodded, studied, and then ultimately, going extinct again isn't my idea of helping a species.

It's estimated that of all the different kinds of life Earth has ever supported, 99.9% of it has gone extinct already, mostly caused by five mass extinction events of natural causes. Mankind has already created the sixth mass extinction event through greed, ignorance and stupidity, and it will not be stopped. In fact, we're most likely to make it far worse in the decades ahead, which, because of our violent, tribal nature, is very likely to include US among the victims.

So, this is just a pathetic, worthless effort so that some people can feel self-righteous for a short period of time before they witness the same tragedy that man witnessed before and whatever they "resurrect" slips back into the mists of time once more.

That's essentially the equivalent of saying that no endangered species should be preserved either, since the same genetic considerations apply. If the technology exists to resurrect recently extinct species, then there is no qualitative distinction between between those and a remnant population that simply has not gone extinct "yet." So, by equivalence, you're saying that resurrecting the condor is a waste of time, that resurrecting the whooping crane was a waste of time, that protecting the cheetah is a waste of time. Well, at least that saves you from inconvenient little issues such as habitat destruction, doesn't it? Just go for it!

The weakness of the pithy Jurassic Park quotes is that they fail to acknowledge that what we could do sometimes changes the equation as to what we should do.

You can't resurrect everything, nor should you. But when you have an opportunity like this, there's no compelling argument against making the effort. The worst that can happen is that you fail.