PHENOMENA:
THE LOOM
Loggers in a chestnut forest. Courtesy Forest History Society
Resurrecting A Forest
For the cover story in the April 2013 issue of National Geographic, I explore an idea that sounds like pure science fiction: bringing extinct species back to life. What was once the purely the domain of Crichton and Spielberg is becoming a new field of research. Thanks to spectacular advances in cloning, reproductive technology, and DNA sequencing, scientists can now seriously explore the possibility of reviving some species from extinction. If not dinosaurs, then perhaps mammoths or passenger pigeons.
“De-extinction,” as its advocates sometimes call it, is part of a bigger trend these days in the world of conservation. Over the past five decades, conservation has usually taken the form of removing threats so that endangered species can recover–ban pollutants, protect habitats, stop hunting, and the like. Conservationists saved the brown pelican, for example, by protecting it from DDT and similar chemicals and by preserving the coastal wetlands where it lives. What they did not do, however, was tinker with brown pelican DNA to make the birds better able to survive. Indeed, the brown pelican gene pool–the product of millions of years of evolution before humans turned up–was ultimately what the scientists were trying to protect from oblivion.
Meanwhile, over those same five decades, molecular biologists have become adept at probing and manipulating genes. Sequencing genomes went from a dream to just another day’s work at the lab. In the 1970s, scientists began inserting genes from one species into another, and they can now build simple genetic circuits.
For the rest of the article click -
No comments:
Post a Comment