Last week, I wrote an article about trout born from salmon parents
. It's a bit of a nutty story - Japanese researchers injected germ cells from trout into salmon, which produced sperm and eggs (depending on whether they were male or female) that together produced baby trout. Although the parents were salmon, they still produced trout sperm and eggs.
One motivation for the research is that, at some point in the future, an extinct species could be brought back from the dead. Of course, you could only do this if you had previously frozen the germ cells of the species and if you have another closely related species to inject. The Japanese researchers were able to freeze the trout germ cells for 10 months, and say this could be extended indefinitely, in theory.
The technicalities of the research are covered in my article
, but one thing I couldn't find room for was question of when is it too late to bring back extinct species. As Jean-Christophe Vié of the World Conservation Union
points out, what's the point in bringing back a species if its environment is already ruined?
Taking this philosophical argument to the extreme, imagine you had dinosaur germ cells and a suitable host species. Would you bring the T. Rex back? My colleague reckons, yes, definitely, which I find a bit spooky. Perhaps this is just because I suspect he's right and if it were possible to bring the T. Rex back, à la Jurassic Park
, somebody out there would jump at the chance. What about the dodo?
What would be the point of resuscitating species that belongs to the past, other than to satisfy our curiosity? Various initiatives, namely Frozen Ark
, set out to freeze tissue samples of threatened species to preserve their DNA. The director of Frozen Ark says the aim is to ensure this genetic information does not disappear forever. But he also recognises that it could become possible to use it to bring species back from the dead.
At what point should this be ruled out? When is a species so far gone that it no longer makes sense to bring it back?
Inevitably, I am brought back to Jean-Christophe Vié's point: bringing a species back is pointless if it cannot survive in the environment available to it - which is likely to be the case for many species that have disappeared.Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter
Labels: dinosaurs, dna, endangered species, extinction, frozen-ark