Seems sadistic to bring back a species to a world in which it can't survive in the wild. It's existence will be nothing more than a plaything for humans to look and gawk at.
We have barely been able to do that for animals which are still living, but lost their natural environment. Assuming we can recreate a maintain an accurate environment to ensure the bird’s long term success is way, way too optimistic.
The time-honored solution for this is to exterminate invasive species on a small nearby island, and make that a reserve. New Zealand has employed extensively with quite a bit of success, and there are numerous small, uninhabited islands in Mauritius that seem like plausible options.
Good question! I think it is related to knowing that zoo animals have wild counterparts and the ones in zoos are just (unlucky) specimens to be gawked at. You convince yourself this somehow helps the conservation of the wild ones through education etc. That's different from unextincting a species but there's no place for them anywhere in the wild world.
Actually, bringing back extinct or near-extinct animals has a lot of side benefits to ecosystems as a whole - just look at the successes of wolf reintroduction programs. Wolves keep reindeer and similar animals in check, which is beneficial for plant life and subsequently species that depend on greenery [1].
But for that, you need quality breeding stock in zoos in the first place.
Apparently, based on contemporary accounts, opinion was varied, but they were meaty and easy to catch. A bit of selective breeding would probably make them ideal poultry farm animals.
I'm not a fan of trying to bring back extinct creatures from the grave without first addressing what's wrong with the world that led to their extinction. It really isn't ethical to start creating creatures just for our entertainment (i.e., keeping them in cages). But reintroduction into the wild is also problematic: either they're now an invasive species, or they're now (still) easy prey.
TL;DR: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
It went extinct due to human hunting and invasive species (rats, brought by humans) eating their eggs. While not exactly a solved problem, both of these things have been addressed for other species to help ensure they don't go extinct.
Too late by a century to worry about that. Extinction is so far advanced. Consider large animals: 50% on earth are the ones we raise to eat. Of the remaining, 46% are ... humans themselves!
That leaves 4% of all earthly animals to be 'wild'. A negligible part of the 'ecology'.
We're not going to put the genie of terraforming (reforming the earth to serve human needs) back in the bottle. The bottle is smashed; the earth is one large human park.
Anyway, still we need to try not to destroy the atmosphere and water because they're critical to human needs and processes. That's reason enough.
https://colossal.com/wp-content/themes/colossal/img/dodo/her... seems to be the main culprit: 10MB of JPEG at 2880x2400, absolutely unnecessary given that a simple re-export at 70% quality (imperceptible differences) takes it down to 385KB and a rescale to 1440x1200 takes it down even further to 72KB. Makes you wonder how many petabytes are pointlessly running between continents. Although in this case WordPress should have taken care by default to optimize the images.
JPEG quality 70% absolutely wrecks the noise for me. This is quite perceptible at the size the image is used at. If the noise is really neccessary for the page is another question but surely there are better options than turning the JPEG quality down to 'ass'.
It should do so by spawning a number of different processes that each cut off resources of the targeted process, and which terminate any subprocesses started by the target process...
International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (InGen) was able to recreate all kinds of extinct animals with the goal of cloning these creatures and displaying them in a theme park on a tropical island.
This company is only planning to recreate an extinct Dodo bird, and use it to terraform the planet Mars on Elon Musk's future expedition.
Since everyone is complaining about the site rather than the topic - I hate sites that hide the menu bar when you scroll downwards but then show it again when you scroll even slightly upwards. If you scroll up when you're trying to read something that happens to be placed at the top of the viewport, the menu swings down unceremoniously to obscure it. There are so many other options, have a button that pops out the menu or have it there permanently (if you're hiding it because it doesn't fit with the design of the page as you scroll, it's even worse that it just appears in front of the content). Having the trigger to view the menu as scrolling upwards a bit is bad UX anyway as it's not logical - there are very very few cases where scrolling should trigger a non-cosmetic interaction with the page.
I like to align things (new paragraphs etc) at the top of my viewport during long reads, so this happens quite often.
At one level this delights me and gives me optimism. At a basic aesthetic level, a world that has dodos, and woolly mammoths, and sabre tooth tigers, is a more interesting one. "Bring back as many of these magnificent creatures as possible!", I think.
Yet, to expand on points made by other posters, the very existence of this species requires a kind of ecological disequilibrium. Humans will need to maintain strict control over what other species are allowed into its habitat (the article mentions rats in particular). It seems like a fight against entropy, which requires ongoing work, like maintaining two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures. Or keeping COVID from becoming endemic in China (or any other country).
I have always found the dodo to be a sympathetic animal, though. Tame, friendly, trusting. I suppose when you're hungry you eat anything, and once you've killed your first animal for meat, then the second and third become easier, so if I were not an insulated modern myself (indeed a bit like the dodo), then I would maybe have an easy time killing one. But as it stands, I find it hard to imagine, and my impulse is to try to befriend the creatures. "Yes, let's bring back the dodo", I think, "maybe we can be friends".
Maybe that's not a horrible ecological niche. Dogs are not totally incapable creatures, but in America they live almost exclusively as domesticated pets. In a way, the same may be true of humans, who are all utterly dependent on the rest of society. Perhaps the dodo, who will live at the mercy of peoples' tastes, will not be so different from many of us.
While your main point is philosophical, you mentioned the practical concern of rats - for what it’s worth, Alberta, a Canadian province the size of France, has completely eradicated rats despite being land-bordered on all sides by provinces with rats. Alberta produces a lot of grain, and it’s a big savings for them to not have to deal with rats. This is accomplished with a provincial task force that costs about half a million bucks a year, aggressive reporting action by the population, and enthusiastic cooperation from the local farms. So it can be done, and it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds!
That's really interesting (I now live in an East Coast US city with a rat problem) -- do they have any good papers or anything on what tactics they used to eliminate the rats? 500K a year sounds like a bargain, I bet that's NYC's rat czar's basic salary
One big thing is that it is too cold in Alberta for most rats to survive. The only one that's very viable is the Norway rat, and even then it's too cold for them to live outside all year round - so if you can keep them out of structures you can eliminate them entirely. Once the initial kill-off was done (which was accomplished with ludicrous amounts of poison), it's mostly about protecting the provincial border.
But why, no really, I get that we're technically at fault, but the world changes, there are billions (about 5 billion to be exact) of extinct species, which ones do we pick to un-extinct? Do we have to prove that we or one of our ancestors was a direct cause for the extinction? And when we do un-extinct a species, what does that achieve, other than entertainment for some few people and maybe the feeling of having achieved something "good"? Surely the money spent researching this could be better spent making the world as it is a better place and improving ways in which humans interact with the world to reduce extinction rates and general harm to the environment.
Keystone species can be important to the overall environment and other animals. Bring back the right ones and you could improve the environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
I have to say that I generally agree with you, though that's unpopular.
It's a cool project and it has scientific merit, it's cool to do just because they'll do something that's never been done before, and learn things that can be useful elsewhere.
I do kind of agree that it seems pointless, and their justification seems more moral than it does practical.
The moralistic side of this stuff sometimes seems to verge on nature worship with some people. It seems that we have somehow got it in our collective heads that we need to preserve the planet _exactly_ how it was right before the Industrial Revolution started, forever.
What would the business model look like for doing this?
I spend $20M on lab time and experts to clone a dodo... Then I lease that dodo to zoos for $2000/day... and in the dodo's lifespan I will never make a profit...
Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair. I then rent them to zoos around the world, at perhaps $200/day (lower price because there is no exclusivity anymore). Even this plan is dubiously profitable, considering my rental income will only slowly ramp up over 20 years as dodos are born...
> What would the business model look like for doing this?
What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?
Some people want to wear diamonds and dine at posh restaurants, some want to do gardening and write books on it, some want to revive extinct birds; it's not a means, it's an end.
I hope you are right, but this is a for-profit company that has just received a new round of funding. From an Austin American-Statesman article[1], "Colossal Biosciences, which this week announced a new $150 million funding round, is led by Austin-based entrepreneur Ben Lamm..." And from a Yahoo! Finance article[2], "Colossal’s use of various gene editing technologies will make waves across sectors – in agriculture...as well as in human health through improved gene therapy and vaccine development."
I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a "business model" here.
I have no idea, but I would assume the Dodos are just a good PR stunt.* There are many many many extinct animals, why Dodo? because they seem to be almost universally known. So i they are successful, it will help them move on to the next stage of profitibility, but along the way they will gain knowledge, skill, etc. I don't know how they intend to make that knowledge/skill the basis for a business though.
* To be clear, I don't think the idea of a "PR stunt" is a bad thing, just that they are unlikely to consider the Dodo the profitability endpoint. Maybe they intend to build a park of extinct animals on an island somewhere and charge people huge fees to visit....
> What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?
I'm not sure what your point is. Guided fishing trips is a pretty well established business model. It is a very different business model from de-extinction. (To be clear i don't agree with the grand parent either, i think its plausible albeit hard to get a succesful business model around ultra rare items).
Bigger chickens would mean nothing to the food supply. We have lots of birds that are (1) commonly eaten and (2) much bigger than chickens. Chickens are very small.
Keep breeding dodos and then charge a million dollars a weekend to anyone who can afford it to go hunt them, and your initial $30m is likely recouped within the first year
There likely isn't enough genetic diversity to get more than a first generation of dodo's. You'd end up doing a lot of inbreeding and the rate of successful births would be very low.
I'm more interested in the business case for farming giant tortoises, since they don't even need to be cloned. (although, it might help. Don't know if birds or reptiles are easier to clone)
I hear them suckers are delicious. Also, their population's kinda low.
If you founded a company that actually, really, visibly de-extincted the very famous,, deeply recognizable, colloquially-adopted dodo ("dead as a dodo, "dumb as a dodo", etc), and then had a literal dodo-looking dodo bird walking around in some game preserve for all the world to see, finding funding via dodo leasing would be the least of your monetary inflows.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
Also worth noting that dodo birds were reportedly very tasty and meat-rich, so farming millions of them as a resurrected species for food is hardly out of the question.
There are lots of birds that can have 100 offspring in a lifetime. Wild ducks lay ~12 eggs per year, and live 10 years. Commercial ducks can do 20x that.
Obviously, all those will be siblings, so your chance of getting much of another generation is low.
Since nobody's actually answering your question: Colossal's business model is to use de-extinction to push the frontier of various genetic manipulation techniques, patent them when possible, and sell/license the IP they generate to people who are doing other things. For example, the idea is that in de-extincting the dodo, we'll generate useful techniques for manipulating birds that the ag industry might want to use with chickens.
It seems tenuous to me. But I believe that's their stated plan.
I've spoken with some people there and this is basically their plan. Technology and experience in making significant genetic changes in large organisms likely ends up being valuable for lots of things less flashy than de-extincting famous animals.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.
"But there aren't any heads..."
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
Since animal testing is negative PR these days, it seems like de-extincting animals artfully sidesteps any ethical or moral objections. I mean, dead animals/species don’t have any rights, so they can run all the frankenstein experiments they want without any PETA activists throwing cans of soup.
Now that I think about it, the business model seems eerily similar to 23 and Me , where they give you some basic ethnicity report and then do who knows what with your DNA afterwards.
Christ. I realize you're probably being facetious. But de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.
> de-extincting species to consign them to industrial food production (or some other industrial extraction process) seems like one of the more plausible business models. That's grim.
Thanks for calling this out in plain English.
To the extent my earlier comment is "funny", it's nervous-laughter funny which says something like "this is inhumane and probably immoral and its logical absurdity strongly suggests we should change our behavior to protect sentient species from such things coming to pass."
this is the human way and of course we will do exactly that. After we produce dodo birds for the wealthy to consume we will redouble our efforts to do the same with dinosaurs.
Brontosaurus steak was a running gag on the Flintstones, but I'm sure it would be a huge hit among the kinds of people who pay $1000 for a gold-encrusted Salt Bae steak.
The return is that Dodo's are no longer extinct. That could still turn into an operation that "makes money" if only to pay a wage for those involved, but with investors not looking for a monetary return. Obviously more care is needed to make sure it's legitimate since economics doesn't naturally validate such propositions.
> What would the business model look like for doing this?
sigh
We have exterminated a species. It's not going to be the last. We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse. We are probably not going to be able to backup the entire biosphere, but we should start somewhere.
Governments should be doing this. What's the business model of the military?
> We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse.
yawn, sigh (whatever other passive-aggressive bodily functions you can imagine).
99% percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. The biosphere is not some pathetic weak, non resilient, piece of glass that you think it is. We can easily lose a lot more species and the biosphere would be just fine.
> We have exterminated a species.
We are not some outside influence/cancer on the planet. We ARE nature, and nature is survival of the fittest, we are fit, dodos are not.
I believe that pets are already clonable and this service is available from companies. The problem is that traits such are coloration and perhaps, personality, tend to be polygenic and influenced by environmental factors. Thus the clones are may not at all look (or behave) like the original.
Nah you got it all wrong. Forget Zoo's, first breed WAY more than just 100. Then charge $30 a lb for Dodo wings/legs/breast to fine dining establishments.
Once you got a nice little operation going, you can then start selling Dodo eggs as well.
I guess you can sell them exclusively to a gulf state such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates that currently has huge revenues from oil, but knows that will not last, and is working hard on getting sources of income for those times.
Dodos scale like software and streaming platforms and need to be pitched like one.
Most of the cost is up front, and the cost for the next marginal dodo user is very small. Cost to make a dodo is $3 and I can sell them for $33.
We plan to disrupt the dog and cat market. There are currently 80M pet dogs and 60M pet cats in the US. If we capture 50% of this market, that would be 70M dodos.
This gives a projected ~210 Million annual recurring revenue in the US alone.
As growth company, we foresee a price to earnings of 40x at this point, which would put us at market cap of 8.5 billion.
If I sell you 49% of the company for your 30M startup cost, this would represent a 28000% return on investment for you.
Don't worry about exclusivity if you can create more than one. The world's population won't descend on the one city with exclusivity, but the broader number will descend on each city's zoo presenting a fresh new exhibit like this. Far more than $200/daily multiplied by the many zoos around the world.
Think about how China manages pandas with zoos around the world. The pandas in my hometown zoo got a lot of press and attention. I've never seen them, but their names are generally common knowledge. Struggle to remember the names of some of my friends' kids, but I can remember bloody Wang Wang and Fu Ni.
I met Ben Lamm through a mutual friend when he came and sat down for dinner next to us and we ended up joining tables together. At the time the big news was his mammoth de-extinction project. He said that his business model was to essentially set up zoo exhibits and charge people to go see the mammoths. He also said that given how long the elephant gestation period is that it would take a while for the mammoth project to get going so they were looking at other de-extinctions they could do. I guess the dodo was one.
The zoo idea didn't seem to stack up to me and my friends so our consensus was his idea was to generate hype and exit, possibly licensing some of the tech developed along the way.
But nowhere near as captivating for media soundbites and news posts. The dodo is one very symbolic bird and just about everyone recognizes it right away.
Love it! Questions of ethics aside, I think it's a fascinating idea (one that may be completely unachievable) and would have a profound impact on history if achieved.
Nobody has figured out how to stop everyone else from extincting species. These people may be able to de-extinct some species themselves. Whichever thing you can actually do yourself is the solution [1].
I see. I guess that it could also help biodiversity efforts from a PR standpoint to have wildlife reserves for a 'charismatic' animal like the dodo, similar to how everybody wants to protect the panda bear.
Could do. There's zoo pandas. There's the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone where they're less likely to get shot by farmers protecting livestock. Anti-poaching guards for wild rhinos. Seagrass restoration for manatees. Programs for people to grow baby mussels in fish tanks so they can be relocated to the ocean. Hunting programs for deer culling. Giving out free native plants and seeds to help native birds. Lots of options depending on the needs of each species.
Should we save that person that we have in front? After all, thousands are dying every hour around the world. Distribution matters, you can't be everywhere.
It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
There are so many problems in this world that could be solved if only we could "get everyone to do X." The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X." So when a small team comes up with a plan and says "we (small team) are going to do Y (something very technically difficult)", it's not helpful to reply "but wouldn't it be easier if we just got everyone to do X?"
Sure, but if X results in Z and Y is 0.00001 Z, it's not without merit to point out that perhaps that doesn't really accomplish Z, the nominal goal of Y.
It's worse than that, since it may give the lazy or disingenuous an opportunity to muddy the waters by pointing out that... "hey Y reverses Z (or 0.00001 of it) so we don't need to worry about it any more!".
> The biggest problem is that we don't know how to "get everyone to do X."
In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation
The world uses Uber an similar apps to bring an stranger's car at your location to pick you up, shouldn't we instead have a network of fast trains in every single city given that it would be much faster and less damaging for the environment? Well yes, but unfortunately that would require huge policy changes and major coordinated efforts unlikely to become reality, just like the changes needed to stop extinctions.
That is so ridiculous. What is the “usual” rate and how would we even justify such a thing. People are so caught up in environmentalism they don’t realize how anti-nature and laughably ignorant of scientific reason they end up being.
To quote from the article that I linked, "Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year."
And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate.
Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
On extinction this [1] is an extremely informative article on how estimations are made, and why they vary in such extreme ways. Observed extinctions are many orders of magnitude less than 6 per hour. The article (2015) references a total of about 800 observed extinctions in 400 years. And some number of those extinctions were not actually extinctions.
So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number.
Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote.
It’s not just that the critical bit for the 800 number is: “That’s because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. It’s also because we often simply don’t know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.”
A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
In other words, those estimates are as reliable as Drake's equation output. Someone who can't say "I don't know" when they know they don't know, is either a fool or a con artist.
well if we're taking into account microorganisms, every mall parking lot ever paved has likely caused the extinction of at least some endemic microorganisms
> Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions?
Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
We've been hunting species to extinction for 60k years, yes, but we haven't reached global transformation of the environment until the past few hundred.
But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
We are just another species. Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere. The only thing that will change is their makeup. Organisms that can’t keep up with their environment die and are replaced by new ones that can.
We are another species but we operate more like a disease. We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.
> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.
If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.
> We are no longer operating unchecked by the remainder of the biosphere.
But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.
What we're actually doing is making the environment less suitable for us and most of the other currently existing species. Long term, that's not a problem. Once we're done trashing the place, life, biodiversity, and working ecosystems will still be here. They will just be very different from what they are now.
How is it not natural? Because people are the species outcompeting the other ones? That’s a weird view of what natural is and it will only cause inefficiencies and prevent organisms that are fit for survival from arising.
The word natural exists specifically to make a distinction between human causes and all other causes. Saying “humans are natural, therefore anything humans do is natural as well” is to render the word meaningless.
I’m not even sure how we know that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something non obvious about it … like it’s an estimate of insect species presumed to be lost based on Amazon deforestation per year or … who knows.
Note that if this project succeeds, then dinosaurs are not far behind.
For example, we have dinosaur bones, but very little actual dodo fossils (apparently only one foot and one piece of jaw [1]). The way this project is described, they will not need DNA of the dodo itself, only of its closest living relative (Nicobar pigeon) and closest extinct relative where we have DNA (Rodrigues solitaire). The genome of the dodo will be recreated by interpolation.
Could that work for dinosaurs? Why not? There are lots of living relatives (all the birds, including the famous Cassowary, which some call a "living dinosaur"). We can do lots of genome interpolation, and we can identify the genes related to various morphological features. Not different at all from what they plan to do with the dodo.
Would we ever get actual dinosaur DNA? Never say never. But even if we don't, it's quite likely we'll be able to deextinct the dinosaurs, if we can deextinct the Dodo.
Just one year after that paper claiming the DNA half life of 521 years[1], the DNA of horse from 700k years ago was sequenced [2]. That would be about 1344 half-lives. Then, in 2021 the DNA of a mammoth that lived 1.2 million years ago was sequenced.
To answer your question, dinosaurs last lived 65 million years ago.
Dinosaurs (non-avian) lived 66 million years ago+. The conditions that can preserve DNA longer is cold which is why Mammoth DNA in permafrost was able to be recovered. There's no permafrost from 66 million years ago. There's no means by which pre-avian dinosaur DNA might be preserved.
What about the Michael Crichton "mosquito stuck in amber" idea? I've been curious about that for ages - assuming the amber is room temperature, would that even help preserve DNA for an extra day? I've been leaning towards "no", but I am extremely far from an organic chemist!
Encasing in amber really only shields you from outside things. Those include chemicals (especially oxygen, oxygen is _very_ reactive), life (bacteria) and possibly some shielding against radiation (eg light).
Those do encompass a _lot_ of the reason that anything decays, but unfortunately it's not _all_ of the reasons things decay. And over millions of years, the remaining decay mechanisms are enough that you're really not going to have much/any intact DNA. It makes for a good story though.
GP wasn't saying they will find dinosaur DNA, they were saying it may be possible to statistically infer a dinosaur sequence from the sequences of many remaining descendant species, that are still alive today.
The ethics could flow in the other direction. If we wiped out homo neanderthalensis, de-extincting a breeding community of them could be restorative justice.
The Soviets were extremely close to making human-chimp hybrids. In 2019 human-monkey chimera embryos were successfully produced though they were only allowed to develop for a few weeks. Development was stopped prior to the development of a nervous system
Why would we de-extinct an ugly, non tasty bird that cannot fly and who's ecosystem is gone for 100's of years and risk destabilize the current ecosystem that does not include it?
Why are we spending billions of dollars to blast harmful exhaust into our atmosphere to put humans on a barren planet constantly being bombarded with deadly radiation.
I've been following Colossal and de-extinction efforts more generally with some interest (Beth Shapiro's books How to Clone a Mammoth and Life as We Made it are very eye-opening both to the weirdness of the advances of the last 10 years and how far we still have to go)
However I'm getting a little cynical/skeptical when Colossal announces new species to their roster without announcing progress on the other ones, especially given my understanding that mammoths are supposed to be one of the easiest (relatively). I'm guessing the Nicobar pigeon to the dodo is much farther than the elephant to the mammoth, and I think Shapiro thought there was something fundamentally more difficult about working with eggs as well.
This page is pretty heavy on pretty graphics and history and pretty light on recent technological breakthroughs that would make this more feasible.
Nothing to add but also wanted to shoutout Life as We Made It and How to Clone a Mammoth. Had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Shapiro and she's as pleasant as she is brilliant.
It seems like their tools and techniques might have value without achieving de-extinction [1]. If they can't find a way to profit off anything they've done, then I'd be worried.
Last I heard, they had already implanted embryos in Indian elephants and the pregnancies, which are twenty something months long, are in process. But it's just something I heard in passing recently so I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in it. Still, it will be very interesting if we have a small heard of mammoths running around next year.
Wow, that's a hell of a lead time! Why not start with something smaller and faster? Even birds have a very seasonal reproduction cycle, why not start with something closer to a model organism. Are there any exotic and extinct rodents out there?
As far as I can tell, the page doesn't mention at all where the Dodo DNA is coming from. They mention chickens and pigeons etc but not Dodo DNA. Maybe I missed something?
This paper [1] shows they extracted the mitochondrial DNA from samples from "the UCSC Paleogenomics ab (samples AMNH 612456, OMNH 1764, AMNH 224546, OMNH 1762, AMNH 616460, Zm1, S1B1, OUMNH 1759), the University of Copenhagen (sample ZMUC AVES-105485), the McMaster University Ancient DNA Centre (samples FMNH 47395, FMNH 47396, and FMNH 47397), and Griffith University (sample D3538)".
> Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project — fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA — based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark.
> The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family — the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. It’s a process which would allow them to narrow down which mutations in the genome “make a dodo a dodo,” Shapiro said.
From a technology perspective - due to recent advancements in ancient genome sequencing and synthetic biology methods - I find it's a good time to start such a project. Also note that lots of avian genomes have been sequenced in the last years.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadand
https://twitter.com/VictorVescovo/status/1620504852802699265...
https://www.doc.govt.nz/news/media-releases/2016/predator-fr...
The question is different when it can be summed up as "to be or not to be", but I think it's still an ethical bag of hurts.
But for that, you need quality breeding stock in zoos in the first place.
[1] https://defenders.org/blog/2020/03/we-were-wrong-about-wolve...
TL;DR: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
That leaves 4% of all earthly animals to be 'wild'. A negligible part of the 'ecology'.
We're not going to put the genie of terraforming (reforming the earth to serve human needs) back in the bottle. The bottle is smashed; the earth is one large human park.
Anyway, still we need to try not to destroy the atmosphere and water because they're critical to human needs and processes. That's reason enough.
Ecological niches shifting around doesn't necessarily require that something's wrong.
Cache egress $0.02-$0.20 per GiB
Getting on the front page of Hacker News might hurt their "pocket's" a bit.
original: https://postimg.cc/GBX9Y8Cq
optimized: https://postimg.cc/23hrNbKM
literally imperceptible
(Hollywood showed me that could be a bad thing. Frogs, Cuttlefish...)
This company is only planning to recreate an extinct Dodo bird, and use it to terraform the planet Mars on Elon Musk's future expedition.
I like to align things (new paragraphs etc) at the top of my viewport during long reads, so this happens quite often.
Yet, to expand on points made by other posters, the very existence of this species requires a kind of ecological disequilibrium. Humans will need to maintain strict control over what other species are allowed into its habitat (the article mentions rats in particular). It seems like a fight against entropy, which requires ongoing work, like maintaining two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures. Or keeping COVID from becoming endemic in China (or any other country).
I have always found the dodo to be a sympathetic animal, though. Tame, friendly, trusting. I suppose when you're hungry you eat anything, and once you've killed your first animal for meat, then the second and third become easier, so if I were not an insulated modern myself (indeed a bit like the dodo), then I would maybe have an easy time killing one. But as it stands, I find it hard to imagine, and my impulse is to try to befriend the creatures. "Yes, let's bring back the dodo", I think, "maybe we can be friends".
Maybe that's not a horrible ecological niche. Dogs are not totally incapable creatures, but in America they live almost exclusively as domesticated pets. In a way, the same may be true of humans, who are all utterly dependent on the rest of society. Perhaps the dodo, who will live at the mercy of peoples' tastes, will not be so different from many of us.
The wikipedia article is good too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rat#Alberta
One big thing is that it is too cold in Alberta for most rats to survive. The only one that's very viable is the Norway rat, and even then it's too cold for them to live outside all year round - so if you can keep them out of structures you can eliminate them entirely. Once the initial kill-off was done (which was accomplished with ludicrous amounts of poison), it's mostly about protecting the provincial border.
Here's a more academic rendition: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
People there take it seriously. One town formed a posse when they found an infestation and killed them with brooms and sticks: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/neighbourhood-posse-stomps-ou...
Fun article about a Wikipedia revision war about the territory of the brown rat: https://crackmacs.ca/lifestyle/rats-in-alberta/
That article is two years old. The revision war is ongoing today: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brown_rat_distributi...
It's a cool project and it has scientific merit, it's cool to do just because they'll do something that's never been done before, and learn things that can be useful elsewhere.
I do kind of agree that it seems pointless, and their justification seems more moral than it does practical.
The moralistic side of this stuff sometimes seems to verge on nature worship with some people. It seems that we have somehow got it in our collective heads that we need to preserve the planet _exactly_ how it was right before the Industrial Revolution started, forever.
I spend $20M on lab time and experts to clone a dodo... Then I lease that dodo to zoos for $2000/day... and in the dodo's lifespan I will never make a profit...
Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair. I then rent them to zoos around the world, at perhaps $200/day (lower price because there is no exclusivity anymore). Even this plan is dubiously profitable, considering my rental income will only slowly ramp up over 20 years as dodos are born...
What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?
Some people want to wear diamonds and dine at posh restaurants, some want to do gardening and write books on it, some want to revive extinct birds; it's not a means, it's an end.
I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a "business model" here.
[1]: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/01/...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/colossal-biosciences-secures-...
Maybe the plan is to make money off the technology they create to do this and let the dodos do whatever dodos do?
* To be clear, I don't think the idea of a "PR stunt" is a bad thing, just that they are unlikely to consider the Dodo the profitability endpoint. Maybe they intend to build a park of extinct animals on an island somewhere and charge people huge fees to visit....
Well for one thing it would definitely not involve $20M+ in up front costs..
I'm not sure what your point is. Guided fishing trips is a pretty well established business model. It is a very different business model from de-extinction. (To be clear i don't agree with the grand parent either, i think its plausible albeit hard to get a succesful business model around ultra rare items).
Keep breeding dodos and then charge a million dollars a weekend to anyone who can afford it to go hunt them, and your initial $30m is likely recouped within the first year
I hear them suckers are delicious. Also, their population's kinda low.
If you do a limited tour of the top 20 cities in the USA (population 35 million, you only need 1% of people to attend)
Not totally unreasonable, though I think you’d have better luck with something like a wooly mammoth.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
Also, there is a fun movie by Aardman Animations about Charles Darwin and a band of pirates whose captain keeps the last remaining dodo as a pet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...!
Genetic engineering technology has a large potential market in healthcare, agriculture, the chemical industry, and elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population
Obviously, all those will be siblings, so your chance of getting much of another generation is low.
It seems tenuous to me. But I believe that's their stated plan.
They swore that they were generating innovations for good, to license to worthy businesses. No patent trolling.
Then they became a patent troll.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.
"But there aren't any heads..."
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
"ugly creatures who excreted slimy, foul-smelling residue, and whose multiple mouths ground incessantly on garbage"
You’re off to a good start to serving an historically unserved market.
I read somewhere that roasted dodos are delicious.
Thanks for calling this out in plain English.
To the extent my earlier comment is "funny", it's nervous-laughter funny which says something like "this is inhumane and probably immoral and its logical absurdity strongly suggests we should change our behavior to protect sentient species from such things coming to pass."
The return is that Dodo's are no longer extinct. That could still turn into an operation that "makes money" if only to pay a wage for those involved, but with investors not looking for a monetary return. Obviously more care is needed to make sure it's legitimate since economics doesn't naturally validate such propositions.
sigh
We have exterminated a species. It's not going to be the last. We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse. We are probably not going to be able to backup the entire biosphere, but we should start somewhere.
Governments should be doing this. What's the business model of the military?
To protect the currency.
yawn, sigh (whatever other passive-aggressive bodily functions you can imagine).
99% percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. The biosphere is not some pathetic weak, non resilient, piece of glass that you think it is. We can easily lose a lot more species and the biosphere would be just fine.
> We have exterminated a species.
We are not some outside influence/cancer on the planet. We ARE nature, and nature is survival of the fittest, we are fit, dodos are not.
2- Once the technique becomes reliable, clone pets for rich people.
3- Profit!
...then, one day, possibly also human organs for transplants.
Once you got a nice little operation going, you can then start selling Dodo eggs as well.
Dodos scale like software and streaming platforms and need to be pitched like one.
Most of the cost is up front, and the cost for the next marginal dodo user is very small. Cost to make a dodo is $3 and I can sell them for $33.
We plan to disrupt the dog and cat market. There are currently 80M pet dogs and 60M pet cats in the US. If we capture 50% of this market, that would be 70M dodos.
This gives a projected ~210 Million annual recurring revenue in the US alone.
As growth company, we foresee a price to earnings of 40x at this point, which would put us at market cap of 8.5 billion.
If I sell you 49% of the company for your 30M startup cost, this would represent a 28000% return on investment for you.
Think about how China manages pandas with zoos around the world. The pandas in my hometown zoo got a lot of press and attention. I've never seen them, but their names are generally common knowledge. Struggle to remember the names of some of my friends' kids, but I can remember bloody Wang Wang and Fu Ni.
The zoo idea didn't seem to stack up to me and my friends so our consensus was his idea was to generate hype and exit, possibly licensing some of the tech developed along the way.
Serve dodo as an exclusive gourmet meal to thirty oil sheikhs at $1 million a piece.
Easy.
Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Also it seems rather unlikely that they can scale their approach to 6 de-extinctions per hour...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-sh...
It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation
Thats what the Baha'i Ruhi institute seeks to do
https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circ...
With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate.
Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number.
Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote.
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?
The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.
But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...
> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.
If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.
But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.
For example, we have dinosaur bones, but very little actual dodo fossils (apparently only one foot and one piece of jaw [1]). The way this project is described, they will not need DNA of the dodo itself, only of its closest living relative (Nicobar pigeon) and closest extinct relative where we have DNA (Rodrigues solitaire). The genome of the dodo will be recreated by interpolation.
Could that work for dinosaurs? Why not? There are lots of living relatives (all the birds, including the famous Cassowary, which some call a "living dinosaur"). We can do lots of genome interpolation, and we can identify the genes related to various morphological features. Not different at all from what they plan to do with the dodo.
Would we ever get actual dinosaur DNA? Never say never. But even if we don't, it's quite likely we'll be able to deextinct the dinosaurs, if we can deextinct the Dodo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo#Physical_remains
To answer your question, dinosaurs last lived 65 million years ago.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130626-an...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/mammoth-molars-yield...
Those do encompass a _lot_ of the reason that anything decays, but unfortunately it's not _all_ of the reasons things decay. And over millions of years, the remaining decay mechanisms are enough that you're really not going to have much/any intact DNA. It makes for a good story though.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/world/nodosaur-fossil-stomach...
[1] https://xkcd.com/1211/
[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/why-are-birds-the-only-surviv...
A non-voluntary breeding program of sapient beings has serious ethical issues, especially when it exists to assuage a weird sense of historical guilt.
There's this: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-the-oxford-dodo
which is far more than any dinosaur fossil.
However I'm getting a little cynical/skeptical when Colossal announces new species to their roster without announcing progress on the other ones, especially given my understanding that mammoths are supposed to be one of the easiest (relatively). I'm guessing the Nicobar pigeon to the dodo is much farther than the elephant to the mammoth, and I think Shapiro thought there was something fundamentally more difficult about working with eggs as well.
This page is pretty heavy on pretty graphics and history and pretty light on recent technological breakthroughs that would make this more feasible.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/09/28/cia-extinction-woolly-ma...
There is also this one: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-the-oxford-dodo
[1] https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...
> Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project — fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA — based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark.
> The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family — the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. It’s a process which would allow them to narrow down which mutations in the genome “make a dodo a dodo,” Shapiro said.
(https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/31/world/dodo-bring-back-fro...)
From a technology perspective - due to recent advancements in ancient genome sequencing and synthetic biology methods - I find it's a good time to start such a project. Also note that lots of avian genomes have been sequenced in the last years.
It's way better to start with something small and non-mammalian!