Never Mess with the Dead
Everyone has seen horror movies where someone decides to go to a graveyard late at night and summon something spooky, often resulting in terrible consequences because they brought dead people back to life. Realistically, scientists would never try to bring a dead person back to life, yet they’re currently trying to bring back extinct animals. This raises a lot of concern and questions and makes many people think about the ethics surrounding the situation.
A new thing called “de-extinction” is on the rise, where scientists find genome patterns and frozen DNA to try to replicate, or “bring back to life” species that have been completely gone for over 100 years. The Christmas Island Rat has been extinct for over 100 years now, but scientists have found a complete and complex genome pattern that they are trying to insert into a common rat relative to recreate the dead. As cool as it would be to see a vanished species walking and breathing again, many animals are going through intense (non-ethical) testing as well as many failed attempts over the years. Many are concerned with even the idea that the dead will be walking again, and how far scientists will go to prove that impossible is just an opinion.
Possible positives resulting from de-extinction could be revitalizing ecosystems in trouble, or making sure the world never loses some of our most beloved animals such as the tiger and the elephant. However, actually replicating these dead animals will take a lot more time and research to be completed. “To bring back an extinct species, scientists would first need to sequence its genome, then edit the DNA of a close living relative to match it. Next comes the challenge of making embryos with the revised genome and bringing them to term in a living surrogate mother.” This has never been completely accomplished before, which also leaves open the possibility of what happens next. Let’s say these scientists bring back woolly mammoths, which were huge elephant-like creatures that lived in the ice age, and they viciously start murdering people and bring weird diseases that wipe out populations. That may be a very extreme representation of a negative outcome, but I’ve always listened to the term “don’t mess with the deceased.”
Bringing back the exact rat that has been dead for over 100 years will be a nearly impossible task. The replication of everything down to the olfactory bulbs allowing the rats to smell has to be exact, and the genome pattern isn’t detailed enough yet to make the research worth the time. So, in the meantime, we don’t have to worry about extinct animals destroying the earth, but we do need to consider the ethics in science and medicine. Just because it can be done, should we?
Sources
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/14/1036884561/dna-resurrection-jurassic-park-woolly-mammoth
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