What Is ‘De-Extinction’ Really For?

Tasmanian tigers, otherwise known as thylacines, have been extinct since 1936. The species — which looks like a strange mix of a dog, zebra, and a kangaroo — was hunted to extinction, largely because European settlers blamed them for attacks on sheep, poultry, and other livestock.

But before the thylacine was fully eradicated, 13 pups of the marsupial species were preserved in alcohol. Scattered across museum and university collections, they now sit in a milky liquid, their beige skin wrinkled, every one of them looking its hundred years. Yet this may not be the end of the thylacine. In fact, it may be a new beginning.

Of the 13 preserved thylacine specimens, one joey has yielded enough genetic material to map the animal’s genome. With that map in hand, a team of scientists and entrepreneurs now hopes to bring something like the thylacine back to life through a “Jurassic Park”-style revival process known as “de-extinction.” The idea is that by genetically engineering a functional equivalent of the thylacine, scientists could potentially restore its lost ecological role and, in turn, help repair damaged ecosystems.

Today, this effort is being spearheaded by University of Melbourne geneticist Andrew Pask, who has teamed up with Colossal, the start-up cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church. As it so happens, Church is simultaneously on a quest to resurrect the woolly mammoth, for which he’s raised more than $400 million.

However, there’s reason to believe the thylacine could come back sooner: Marsupials are very attractive candidates for de-extinction. For one thing, their offspring only spend weeks in the womb. The brevity of pregnancy makes it easier to use a variety of animals, such as the rat-like dunnart, as surrogate mothers for cloned Tasmanian tigers. Moreover, it means that the replication process can be iterated and, ideally, perfected relatively rapidly. For a mammoth, a successful pregnancy in an elephant surrogate would drag on for almost two years.

Practicalities aside, there’s also the question of “Should we?” Even though the thylacine was ultimately eradicated by humans, they had their own problems. Some scientists think the species was in terminal decline long before human hunting and competition from dingos pushed them out of mainland Australia. Low genetic diversity also left them susceptible to disease. Even if thylacine embryos can successfully gestate in a long-tailed dunnart and be reared to adulthood, it isn’t clear if scientists can squeeze out enough genetic diversity to produce a viable wild population.

Nevertheless, Pask and Lamm say they targeted the thylacine because it was the only large marsupial predator; in fact, its role as an apex predator was never replaced. They compare the return of the thylacine to Tasmania with the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone, imagining the new addition of a keystone species to the Australian continent. Even if that goal proves impractical, techniques pioneered with the thylacine could help other animals. Indeed, woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts have already spun off discoveries that may help protect captive Asian elephants from a deadly herpes virus. Thylacine research, by the same token, might be a lifeline for koalas by spurring the development of assistive reproductive technologies for marsupials.

From another, more cynical perspective, though, these reasons seem like post hoc rationalizations. There is little reason to believe that a careful weighing of risk and benefit really drives interest in Colossal’s de-extinction efforts. Its website justifies researching the topic by referencing moral decency and the firm’s dedication to a rewilded planet. Colossal frames de-extinction as a guilt-driven drive to “[right] an anthropogenically induced wrong.” Perhaps, then, what captivates us is a kind of redemption story — the seductive idea that technology can not only repair nature but absolve us for having degraded it.

The main criticism of de-extinction holds that it is a conservation “sideshow.” The major drivers of extinction, in this view, are climate change and habitat destruction, both of which harm food webs, pollination, disease control, and climate resilience in the ecosystem.

De-extinction, in this line of thought, diverts vital resources from these more important conservation efforts. As philosopher Ronald Sandler puts it, although “it is terrible that there are no longer enormous migrating flocks of passenger pigeons in the United States or freshwater dolphin pods in China … what is even more terrible is that this is no longer a world for them.” In short, bringing back species misses the real problem.

This argument, however, is overly simplistic. Take, for instance, Colossal and Stewart Brand’s Revive & Restore nonprofit, another player in the same space. Both are funded by tech money and venture capital. But while they might be attracting a lot of publicity, they aren’t clearly leeching off or undermining existing conservation efforts.

Moreover, critics underestimate the narrative power of resurrection biology, especially among people who aren’t traditional environmentalists. The endeavor speaks to those who seek a positive, innovation-driven answer to the biodiversity challenge — people left out by the less inspiring calls for limits and demands for expanding protected areas.

Finally, the above criticism overlooks the possibility that de-extinction might help build a large, positive constituency for conservation. If and when we have viable thylacines or mammoths, supporters will want to find or create places to put them.

This is all to say that the debate over de-extinction exposes a major gap in conservation governance. On the one hand, the current mishmash of private and public efforts — each with its own disparate goals and visions of nature — does reasonably well to represent the interests of a great many people. On the other hand, biodiversity is far too important an issue to be steered at once by the chaotic whims of Silicon Valley, the legal battles waged by environmental nonprofits, and the old, sclerotic levers of government bureaucracy. We need higher-level policymaking to set at least a few public priorities for conservation and reconcile enduring conflicts.

The U.S., and most other countries, have no established venue for evaluating and steering efforts such as de-extinction — nothing like, say, the Council on Bioethics under George Bush, but for biodiversity. We should. For such a large and contentious issue, some combination of experts, stakeholders, and ordinary people — from agencies and tribes to nonprofits, researchers, and community organizers — should be meeting regularly in heated deliberation. It wouldn’t be within this body’s purview to answer the “Should we?” question about radical conservation efforts; it couldn’t, anyway. Nor would its purpose be to “kill” or prohibit certain efforts.

Rather, the point would be to convert disagreements regarding biodiversity into guidance for ongoing experimentation. The more precautionary-minded would point out potential oversights or blind spots. They would agitate for more safeguards and monitoring systems for novel strategies, such as de-extinction. The more proactive, in contrast, would try to steer government R&D toward promising but uncertain conservation experiments.

The goal of such meetings would not be consensus. The quest for an unequivocally “correct” answer for any biodiversity question is a fool’s errand, even when attempted via deliberative democracy. Instead, the mission would be to decide on actions that most people can live with, at least in the short term, or with certain concessions. They’d discern ways to leverage dissent into more intelligent policy. Outcomes would be partial victories to as many different groups as possible, converting today’s chaotic, often gridlocked, status quo into something more productive.

Like so many pie-in-the-sky start-up pitches, resurrected mammoths and Tasmanian tigers may end up being more science fiction than reality. But even if bringing them back seems overhyped, de-extinction inspires the public to think about biodiversity conservation, which is probably not top of mind for most people. We might draw a parallel to electric cars. Elon Musk’s first Tesla vehicles were luxury, niche products, but they also helped drag electrics into the public imagination.

Radical conservation efforts arguably do the most good as conversation starters. They invite us to reconsider what matters to us about nature. As technological developments enhance our ability to intervene in ecosystems and to safeguard species’ future, we’re faced with difficult questions: Is it really the “naturalness” of coral or the nativity of species that matters to us? Might we better steward the environment by sometimes jettisoning these ideas to reengineer ecosystems for resilience? At the same time, can bioengineers be trusted?

Ultimately, we can’t really answer these questions without experience. Our own lives offer helpful analogies: For instance, all the premarriage counseling in the world doesn’t fully prepare young lovers for future arguments over how to load the dishwasher or the far more serious disagreements that emerge when raising children, facing financial hardships, or dealing with serious illness. Likewise, we can’t know if radical biodiversity conservation is worthwhile without getting into the thick of it. We may find that engineered coral inspires as much awe and supports just as many fish as “natural” ones. We might learn to love at least some “out-of-place” species.

Biodiversity conservation, however, is traditionally biased toward an abundance of caution. One article in “Conservation Science and Practice” refers to this as the discipline’s “ethos of restraint.” In light of the large gaps in knowledge and the uncertainties about how to contain radical conservation experiments, many scientists advocate waiting. Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky described this ultra-precautionary mindset as calling for “trial without error,” which essentially demands that we have no trials at all.

But precaution comes with its own costs. As coral geneticist Line Bay put it, “The worst thing that we could do is ignore the genetic engineering because it’s frightening for some people, and then get 10 or 15 years down the road and realize it’s the only option.” Inherited ideas about ecological risk can threaten species’ survival. For example, some scientists argue that hybridization between barred tiger salamanders and an endangered California endemic should be prevented. Although the offspring are usually more resilient, they seem to have slightly different effects on the ecosystem. Prioritizing the “genetic integrity” of California salamanders, or the previous ecological baseline, risks leaving the local landscape with no salamanders at all.

My point, of course, isn’t to call for blindly plunging forward. Intelligent trials of de-extinction, assisted migration, assisted evolution, and gene drives would keep risks to a minimum while allowing us to learn more about their practicality and consequences. Start small. Build up slowly. Monitor carefully. Transform criticism into reasonable precautions. Protect against conflicts of interest. Take steps to lessen the potential impact on the victims of error — human and nonhuman. Such commonsensical strategies can turn a proposal that initially seems like opening Pandora’s box into a mechanism for improving the safety of radical conservation interventions.

Biodiversity impacts nearly all of us. Accordingly, conservation decisions shouldn’t only be made by those who claim to speak for “the best available science,” who can most effectively leverage the Endangered Species Act to their side’s advantage, or who just so happen to sit on millions of dollars in venture capital funding. As with any issue in a democracy, almost everyone deserves some input into how we try to achieve a wilder and more vibrant Anthropocene.

Taylor Dotson is an Associate Professor of Social Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the author of three books, including “The Divide,” “Technically Together,” and “Conservation by the People,” from which this article is adapted.