Using CRISPR To Resurrect the Dead (cnet.com) 121
One of our most powerful tools to fight biological obliteration is CRISPR, a burgeoning gene-editing technology that acts like a molecular blade, slicing DNA apart and allowing us to add and subtract genes at will. It's now being used to combat invasive species, destroy antibiotic-resistance bacteria and, controversially, edit the genes of human embryos. From a report: In fact, it's so exceptional at editing DNA that "de-extinction," the process of bringing extinct species back from the dead, is on the table. Science has already unraveled the DNA code of long-dead species such as the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon and Australia's iconic Tasmanian tiger -- and now, pioneering researchers are using CRISPR to remake modern-day descendants in the image of their ancient counterparts. Could we transform an Asian elephant into a woolly mammoth? We are marching toward that reality. "The CRISPR revolution is the whole reason why we've been having these conversations about de-extinction," says Ben Novak, a biologist working on restoring the extinct passenger pigeon.
There are opponents of de-extinction, however. They point to our responsibilities with species already living on the edge of extinction and ensuring we allocate resources to save them. Others are concerned about the ethics of resurrecting ancient beasts and how they might fit into current ecosystems as the planet chokes under the heavy cloud of climate change. In this era, as the planet warms and biodiversity plummets, we're faced with a question. Should we resurrect the dead?
There are opponents of de-extinction, however. They point to our responsibilities with species already living on the edge of extinction and ensuring we allocate resources to save them. Others are concerned about the ethics of resurrecting ancient beasts and how they might fit into current ecosystems as the planet chokes under the heavy cloud of climate change. In this era, as the planet warms and biodiversity plummets, we're faced with a question. Should we resurrect the dead?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: Putting our hands in the cookie jar is what st (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, let's just disassemble civilization. I'm sure you can get plenty of support for that, because ideological absurdities always work better than practical solutions.
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"Discretion and self-restraint" would disassemble civilization?
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Sure, let's just disassemble civilization. I'm sure you can get plenty of support for that, because ideological absurdities always work better than practical solutions.
I don't think limiting our expansion and influence is the same as disassembling civilization.
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I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth. Why? Because I love humanity and the little guy and want a hyper-advanced civilzation where even the poorest live better lives than presidents and billionaires do today.
This is neither a joke nor a troll.
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Trantorization is probably a bit extreme... and unnecessary.
Assume the earth's land area is approximately 58 million square miles.
Assume 50% of it is either under glaciers (too hard to build on) or set aside as wildlife reserves or parks.
Assume 25% is used for farming or heavy industry. That leaves us with approximately 15 million square miles for urban areas.
Of those 15 million square miles, assume:
* 5% is developed to the approximate density of Singapore (20,000/square mile)
* 20% is developed to the appro
An alternative proposition (Score:2)
In short the most responsible and effective thing we as humans can do is to limit in reverse our expansion and influence, allowing the planet to rebalance itself overtime by natural process
An alternative, which is far more in line with how we have always done things, is to find ways to reduce and even eliminate the impact that out continued expansion and influence has on the natural environment and to find ways to expand beyond our planet. CRISPR offers very interesting possibilities for designing custom organisms to sustain human life on e.g. Mars and possibly even terraform planets such as Mars and (if we can get anything can live there) Venus.
Often in solving one problem science and te
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None of this is true. The most responsible thing we can do is continue advancing technology rapidly.
You can less predict 2100 than people in 1900 could predict today.
For example, robots could rip open landfills and sort the goldmine for recycling. Bernies of the day will probably scream local cities aren't getting their money's worth from bidding contractors.
We will produce 100x the energy of today, and more cleanly and cheaply.
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We will produce 100x the energy of today, and more cleanly and cheaply.
I wish more people realized how great that would be.
you bred raptors?? (Score:4, Funny)
you bred raptors??
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yeah, I think they would like a warmer climate
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The world doesn't need our solutions it needs our discretion and self-restraint as a species.
Totally agree, which is why this is important. Most large animals (i.e. megafauna) are extinct because of humans. Bringing back the European lion, the woolly mammoth, or the Tasmanian tiger is just hitting the "undo" button on actions we took in the past. Drawing the line at "things we hunted to extinction" makes sense to me.
Re: Putting our hands in the cookie jar is what st (Score:2)
It's well documented that the great auk and the thylacine were literally hunted into extinction. The auk for it's down, oil, and as food for sailors; the thylacine because it was considered a nuisance animal. There are preserved specimens of both, I wonder if they contain enough DNA to reverse engineer.
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Why don't we just concentrate on bringing back the most tasty animals back, rather than extinct predators.
Maybe things that taste great but don't emit as many "cow farts" ......would
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Then at least let's start with things that are on the record as tasting good... Bring the DoDo back first!
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I think it is called "keeping chickens", nowadays.
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More profits for airlines?
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Isn't this the kind of thing that science fiction gives us good reason to question?
Other things that works of fiction give us good reason to fear: Werewolves, goblins, vampires, Rumpelstiltskin.
Re: Nature finds a way! (Score:1)
2^10 is not about 100. Its 1024 or a number between 0 - 1023. I'm sure there are some other takes on it but 100 is straight out.
Step it up or lose the geek card!
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The Ebola situation is, in fact, considerably MORE scary than he/she said.
I have spoken to doctors from Sierra Leone, and a degree of immunity in the population is likely a factor. To what degree, we don't know. It could also be a factor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), because "Ebola" virus is named after the Ebola river in DRC, where it was first reported.
Screening of people arriving from the infected region did catch infected people in
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"Other things that Science gives us to fear": not sure what you're saying. Science didn't give us Ebola, nor did it give us the ability to understand doubling (that story dates back at least to the year 1256, according to the Wikipedia article, long before modern science).
"presumably because that part of West Africa had a degree of natural immunity" No, that's not why. Read up on it.
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You're not wrong. But one of the nice things about serious Sci-Fi is that it allows to explore these thought experiments and consider implications for technology before they happen. This is not a bad thing and very useful. Sure Jurassic Park's primary purpose is to entertain but the book explores many important ideas and arguments about whether or not we should resurrect extinct animals if we do develop the technology to do so. Making it a safety question is silly, but the ethical one is very real. Just lik
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Isn't this the kind of thing that science fiction gives us good reason to question? I'm all for human engineering to solve problems, such as the catastrophe of climate change, but extinctions isn't the biggest problem. What do we get to bring back a passenger pigeon?
Probably nothing, or probably a great food source? What if raising passenger Pigeons turns out to be easier and more economical, having less of an ecological impact that raising chickens? Or what if they have some mechanism that helps fight bacteria and bring about the introduction of new antibiotics.
What if wooly mammoth fur has better properties for clothing than cotton, and we can edit sheep to produce it?
Probably none of the above is going to happen- or probably there are benefits we can't imagine. W
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Passenger Pigeons produced fertilizer like you wouldn't believe. Where I grew up there are areas that were known for historically having passenger pigeon flocks roosting there. The dirt there is incredible for farming more than a century after their extinction. When the earth is tilled up it is black, and I don't mean it's just dark, I mean black.
I saw somewhere recently that chickens are an effective control measure for ticks and other insects that we don't like. I would wager that flocks consisting of man
Doomsayers (Score:1)
This "we're all doomed" climate change religion is injected into every goddamned article now.
Nobody is changing a damned thing about their lifestyles, and cant stop ordering more disposable plastic shit from China. Nobody is willing to deny themselves anything.
It's all 100% virtue signalling. It's like preaching from a bar stool Saturday night, but can't be bothered to get up Sunday to go to church.
Fake, and gay.
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Well, at least the gays* don't produce more offsprings...
* not that there's anything wrong with that. /Seinfeld
People will get bored (Score:5, Interesting)
We'll use technology to bring Wooly Mammoths, Sabre-tooth Tigers, Dodos, and T-Rex back from extinction. Zoos will have lines miles long. Then, after a while, people will just get bored.
Eventually, it'll become more profitable to breed all-black 40-pound tigers and purple-feathered 2-pound mini T-Rexes as exotic pets, and the originals will go extinct again (possibly, with little interest in preventing it, since people will figure we can always de-extinct them again).
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Re: People will get bored (Score:2)
Is there any real evidence that T-Rex even HAD scales, as opposed to feathers? I thought the current consensus was that T-Rex looked more like a humongous ostrich than any modern reptile.
Which ironically, brings up reason #2 why people will get bored: big flightless birds aren't particularly scary... at least, not behind 2" laminated glass at a zoo. In fact, I'll go out on a limb & predict that long before de-extinct'et T-Rexes appear, we'll have 100% designer large reptiles made to look like people THI
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Errrr... I think you misread the sentence, and missed the very important second half. I didn't say we'll make dinosaurs that "LOOK LIKE PEOPLE", I said we'll make dinosaurs that look the way 'people THINK dinosaurs were supposed to have looked like'. If you stop reading the sentence at the word "people", you'll completely misunderstand it.
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You don't have any sense of humor, eh? DigiShaman's remark reminds me of what (Christian) women used to say to guys, "I will not have you ignorant brethren." (You'll probably need to look that up to understand the joke. In a King James Bible.)
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Birds have both feathers and scales on different parts of their bodies.
Feathers, like hair, evolved from scales.
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Crichton did it (Score:2)
Eventually, it'll become more profitable to breed all-black 40-pound tigers and purple-feathered 2-pound mini T-Rexes as exotic pets, and the originals will go extinct again (possibly, with little interest in preventing it, since people will figure we can always de-extinct them again).
In Jurassic Park-the book, not the movie-Hammond got his original round of funding by showing a 2 ft tall elephant, a perfect pet size-but also ill tempered so not suitable as a pet(it also was developed through selective breeding and similar techniques, not genetic engineering). In The Lost World, Dodgson talks about wanting to reverse engineer the Ingen technology to develop, among other things, miniaturized pet dinosaurs (who are also genetically engineered to only eat food produced by his company for a
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We'll use technology to bring Wooly Mammoths, Sabre-tooth Tigers, Dodos, and T-Rex back from extinction. Zoos will have lines miles long. Then, after a while, people will just get bored.
Well, when we get bored with them . . . we'll just eat them. Wholly Mammoth burger, Sabre-tooth Tiger tare-tare, a Dodo for Thanksgiving and a T-Rex T-bone.
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Mmmm, bronto ribs--just so long as they don't tip the car over.
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Mmmm, bronto ribs--just so long as they don't tip the car over.
How many people got this reference?
Re: People will get bored (Score:2)
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Mmmm, bronto ribs--just so long as they don't tip the car over.
How many people got this reference?
Don't you mean:
Yabba-dabba-whoooooooooo got this reference?
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Only old codgers, like me. And I guess you.
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And 10-25 years after the mini-dinosaur terrariums appear, they'll be scampering across parking lots, yards, and roads in South Florida.
Dr. Ian Malcolm (Score:5, Insightful)
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Yummy Dodo eggs (Score:2)
Seems kind of wrong, more because it's a facade... (Score:2)
I am actually OK with doing a lot of things with CRISPR to make lots of better organisms.
However the idea bringing back extinct species in the way talked about here I find kind of bothersome - mostly because it's not really them, just kind of a dressed-up elephant or whatever. Seems a bit cruel to bring an animal like that into being that its own kind might easily reject, and there will be very few (if any) of its own kind around.
I'd say we should probably stick to improving what is, rather than bring back
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But let's try for something really useful - buffaloes with real wings! (and flying pigs - lots of flying pigs!)
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I wonder (Score:1)
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For the mammoth I thought they were using regular elephants as a "base" so any immunities seem like they would transfer over.. but IANAB/G
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For the mammoth I thought they were using regular elephants as a "base" so any immunities seem like they would transfer over.. but IANAB/G
FTA, it appears they are going to change Asian Elephant genes, and Using CRISPR, change them to Mammoth and use an artificial womb.
It... might....just... work, if they use blockchain as part of the process.
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More likely we'll produce a mammoth that bears only a passing resemblance to a mammoth since DNA isn't the only thing an offspring inherits from its parents. I'm sure that in an artificial uterus, you could approximate the various environmental factors that affect gene expression. I hope they'll let me know when they have one of those. Which is to say nothing of either the cytoplasmic junk or the microbiome, which we're starting to realize is pretty damn important, although we have almost no understandin
resurrect polar bears (Score:1)
Into miniature family pets!
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Its not resurrecting the dead (Score:2)
we're faced with a question. Should we resurrect the dead?
No, but that's not what de-extinction is. De-extinction is saying.... here was this species that used to be plentiful, but changing world conditions and the process of evolution caused them to come about and survive for only a time --- then the species got usurped by other creatures or were not sufficiently fit in a changing world.
De-extinction is unimaginative though..... The real question is WHY... Why meddle around trying to re-create w
They won't be the same species (Score:2)
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Other than visual aspects, are we really recreating the actual species? Will we bring back their brain structure/bios?
Only if its PHOENIX BIOS.
Who says they have to be dead? (Score:1)
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I suppose reproduction with a woman would be unknown to the majority of slashdotters...
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The Russian Province of Alaska has been part of the Russian Federation since 2021, when President For Life Donald Trump I, (All Hail His Successfullness,) father of current US President For Life Donald Trump the Second, ceded the former US state back to Russia as a gesture of gratitude for letting him be President again.
Hilarious!
Mod points please.
Resurrection (Score:2)
I can't tell you what a bad idea it is to bring the dead back to life...
Thankfully TFA and TFT (Title) are as disconnected as always on Slashdot.
The extinct ones are tastier (Score:2)
...or we wouldn't have eaten them to extinction.
I wouldn't mind a Dodo barbeque.
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But how would we know if we got the taste right? Maybe it only tastes like what we think Dodo used to taste like?
I'd hit that! (Score:2)
There are no serious ethicals issues to bringing back extinct life (microbes aside maybe).
The real question are early humans. Neanderthals, or some of the stuff in-between modern humans and apes, that probably is too smart for a zoo and too stupid for general society, to say nothing of mates for them.
I say do it (Score:2)
> Science has already unraveled the DNA code of long-dead species such as the passenger pigeon
Now that would put a crimp in Tesla's plans.
Should we protect the living? (Score:2)
Bring back Neanderthal and Denisovan! (Score:1)
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Well, if you're a man, you have a penis where an opening used to be. Perhaps you need a refresher in embryology?