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Today we're gonna talk about de-extinction.
De-extinction is the process of making extinct things not extinct anymore.
There's a lot of buzz about it right now in the scientific community
due to recent advancements in synthetic biology.
Awesome! I get to ride a brontosaurus!
Or do I?
Are we really bringing back extinct animals?
What is really happening here?
There are various complicated reasons why these species would not be the same animals
that walked the Earth hundreds or thousands of years ago.
To de-extinct a species requires finding a specimen with viable DNA.
For instance, a hundred-year-old passenger pigeon from a museum drawer
or a four-thousand-year-old woolly mammoth found thawing in an iceberg in the Arctic.
The reason these animals are being targeted for de-extinction is
because they have close living relatives that are still with us today.
For instance your average rock pigeon or the African elephant.
The Jurassic Park idea isn't really realistic, because unfortunately,
DNA degrades over time, meaning we're not gonna have pet velociraptors any time soon.
As cool as it would be to hide one in your sister's closet.
De-extinction works by extracting the genetic material out of one of these viable specimens,
picking out the parts of that DNA, which makes that animal unique,
replicating those genes and then implanting them into the egg of a compatible cousin.
So, really, we're not resurrecting extinct passenger pigeons,
we're kind of just forcing modern day pigeons to give birth to weird modern/extinct hybrid pigeons.
But even before we get that far, we've got some hurdles to overcome.
Even if you were able to extract enough viable DNA from a museum specimen,
the environmental impact on the growth of the fetus could result
in an inaccurate representation of that animal.
A woolly mammoth grown in an elephant inside of a zoo
is going to develop much differently than an actual woolly mammoth
grown in an actual woolly mammoth in the tundra.
A common example of how a fetus's environment can affect its development
is found in identical twins.
They have the exact same DNA, but they end up with different fingerprints.
Because the fetuses occupy different areas of the womb, interestingly enough,
that affects how their fingerprints develop.
Now try to think about growing an extinct animal within the womb of a totally different animal,
in a different habitat with a different environment and a different diet
and probably a totally different favorite episode of Glee.
So we've talked a little bit about how de-extinction works, at least in theory,
but what about the moral implications of it?
We'll cover that next time in the Brains of our Lives.
This episode of The Brain Scoop was generously brought to you by audible.com.
And they're giving away a free audio book to viewers of The Brain Scoop.
Which means this is an awesome opportunity for you guys to check out some of my favorite books
about natural history.
Like Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates,
and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm
by Monte Reel.
You can get your free audio book by going to audible.com/brainscoop.
Thanks for watching and remember, audible.com/brainscoop.
Free. Free audio book.
That's zero dollars. That's less money than a postage stamp.
It still has brains on it.