Well, one blogger disagrees. He suggests that if the species become extinct, maybe we can bring them back using advanced cloning techniques(i.e. by say the Roslin technique)? I’m not a biologist and I don’t know anywhere near enough about cloning as I probably should do, although I’ve heard of the above technique that entails use of a ‘dormant cell’ to attempt to recreate an organism. But isn’t it necessary to have the living animal, or at least access to such dominant cells, in a sample tissue of the animal? Also, if an animal was extinct tens or hundreds of years ago, is it still possible to replicate their DNA from samples of dead tissue, and use it to create lifeforms with DNA that sufficiently mirror the characteristics of the real animal? And at what point in this process does Bioethics come in?
Since I’ve never heard of a cloned dinosaur, tasmanian tiger, dodo or mammoth, I think maybe we would be best served by preserving the elephant population that we have alive today, than place our hopes on a technique that some advocates claim can bring back the dead.
Related articles
- Should We Have Cloned Lonesome George? (news.discovery.com)
- Tasmanian Tiger – film “The Hunter” (wjjgibson.wordpress.com)
- Lonesome George Dead: Should the Last of The Pinta Tortoise Subspecies Have been Cloned? (naturenplanet.com)
- The Horse Clones Are Coming (buzzfeed.com)
- Cloned Horses Allowed in Olympics (abcnews.go.com)
- TheFutureTimes: Mammoth Reborn at 2015 (fifauzan.wordpress.com)
- Science vs Humanities (terminally-incoherent.com)
- Cloning from the grave (dailymail.co.uk)