Revisiting: De-Extinction - Should We Resurrect Extinct Animal Species?
This episode originally aired on January 14, 2019:
What if we could bring extinct animal species back from the dead? This week, Terra Informer Sofia Osborne brings us a story about de-extinction: Sofia brings us a story about de-extinction: the use of selective breeding, cloning, and genetic engineering to “resurrect” extinct species. This technology poses a lot of moral and ethical questions—would these “de-extincted” animal species be authentic? Could they ever be wild? Do we owe it to the species we’ve driven to extinction to bring them back? And who should decide whether we use this technology?
Extra resources suggested by Sofia:
What if we could bring extinct animal species back from the dead? This week, Terra Informer Sofia Osborne brings us a story about de-extinction: Sofia brings us a story about de-extinction: the use of selective breeding, cloning, and genetic engineering to “resurrect” extinct species. This technology poses a lot of moral and ethical questions—would these “de-extincted” animal species be authentic? Could they ever be wild? Do we owe it to the species we’ve driven to extinction to bring them back? And who should decide whether we use this technology?
Extra resources suggested by Sofia:
- How to Clone a Mammoth by Beth Shapiro
- "The Perils if De-extinction" by Ben Minteer
- The IUCN SSC Guiding Principles on Creating Proxies of Extinct Species for Conservation Benefit
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