By this logic, de-extinction becomes a feel-good, even heroic story, fulfilling our yearning for atonement. Perhaps the most intoxicating argument for de-extinction is the moral one: Bringing back lost species could undo some of the unfathomable destruction people have wrought on the planet.

It is the mammoth in the de-extinction race.ĭe-extinction proponents have assembled a profusion of scientific, ecological, cultural, and aesthetic arguments to support the project.

Other organizations have entered the de-extinction game, such as the nonprofit Revive & Restore, but none have the resources and profile of Colossal, which has now raised $225 million in investment capital and is valued at $1.45 billion. In January 2023, the dodo joined the to-do list. By the time the company announced plans in August 2022 to bring back a striped Australian marsupial called the thylacine, it had amassed $75 million in private funding. (Colossal has yet to de-extinct an animal.) When Colossal launched in September 2021 with $15 million in private funding, its first target was the mammoth. The buzziest company in the business of extinction is the venture-capital-funded Colossal Biosciences, which was founded by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm and rakes in headlines whenever it announces its plans to bring back a new animal. In the decade since, de-extinction has remained a fixture in the popular-science spotlight, enjoying press reserved for only the most audacious, best-funded research. The term first entered public consciousness in the spring of 2013 after a series of TEDx Talks at National Geographic headquarters explored the idea of using DNA to bring species back from extinction, coinciding with the publication of a skeptical and measured feature. This proxy is the realistic dream of de-extinction. It is possible to fashion a hybrid, an animal manipulated into being by genetically editing the desired traits of the lost species into the genome of a living relative. It is not possible to reverse extinction and resurrect a dodo or a mammoth as they existed. If taken at face value, de-extinction is a word that overpromises. And with no real dodos around to teach this new bird how to be a dodo, it may behave like a different bird. A Nicobar pigeon in all its gothic iridescence is certainly beautiful, but it is not a dodo. It would be a genetic hybrid, a calculated reinterpretation of a dodo-ideally bearing some traits of its namesake but perhaps also those of the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative, whose cells will be manipulated to express the physical traits of the extinct species. As the asterisk implies, the dodo* wouldn't be a real dodo, in the strictest sense. Barring some interventionist miracle of conservation, the bird would likely be placed in a large fenced enclosure or small, uninhabited island nearby Mauritius. The dodo* may not be able to roam free and unbounded in its ancestral forests, where the invasive cats, rats, goats, pigs, and macaques that helped extinguish it in the first place will eagerly extinguish it once again. What if I told you that, for hundreds of millions of dollars, this future could be ours? Would you say it was worth it?īefore you answer, there are caveats. Yet this dodo waddles before you, pecking at fallen fruits and nuts with its bulbous beak, like a ghost whose reincarnation may in some way atone for the human sin of driving the species extinct in the first place. You are wandering the forests of Mauritius, an oyster-shaped island east of Madagascar, when you spy a dodo, a bird famous for being as dead as one can possibly be.

Passenger pigeon cloning