![]() However, the geneticist says she’s changed her mind and now views de-extinction as a useful form of scientific public relations. These types of obstacles are why some scientists doubt de-extinction will work, and Shapiro herself has been among the skeptics, expressing doubts about the idea in interviews last year. “We thought that what worked for chickens would apply to other species, but it turns out to be difficult.” “They have to be able to transfer this technology to a pigeon,” he says. This technology already works, McGrew says, but so far only in chickens. If that bird then reproduces, its offspring will be related to the donor cells (and will include any DNA changes). That way, some of those cells will end up forming the new bird’s egg or sperm. ![]() McGrew believes the likely solution is to inject genetically edited cells into the gonads of a developing pigeon chick. “You would have to take it out and implant another nucleus, and it’s impossible to do,” says McGrew. But cloning doesn’t work with a bird egg-it’s a huge cell and its nucleus is an opaque yolk. For mammals, such as cattle or elephants, the answer is easy: cloning. The problem is that while it is easy to gene-edit bird cells in the lab, it’s hard to turn carefully edited cells back into a bird. But it has confronted a major technical difficulty that will also affect the dodo project. He has predicted that the mammoth could arrive before 2029 and that the dodo could come sooner or later than that, depending on scientific factors.Īnother organization, the nonprofit Revive & Restore, has worked for a decade toward bringing back the passenger pigeon, a bird that once dominated American skies. Lamm isn’t offering a firm time frame for producing a dodo. ![]() “What would that mean ethically, if one is not available?” But it still needs an environment,” says Jennifer Li Pook Than, a gene-sequencing specialist at Stanford University, whose parents were born on the island. “It would not really be a dodo-it would be a new species. The big agricultural industry in Mauritius is sugarcane farming, and there are plenty of rats and other non-native predators around. Even if Colossal can make what it terms “a functional proxy for the dodo,” there won’t be a clear answer about where to put it.
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