In late 2021, a team of U.S. scientists announced that they had received massive funding in an effort to bring back the woolly mammoth, a massive land mammal that has been extinct for thousands of years. This would be achieved through the process of genetic resurrection, which uses genetic material from the extinct species and combining it with a similar species to create a modern hybrid species. In the woolly mammoth’s case, this would most likely be the African gray elephant.
In all of the media attention the announcement of a possible return of the woolly mammoth received, one question seemed to echo: Are we too close to recreating Jurassic Park? In other words, should scientists even try to bring back extinct species?
Paul Arena is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. While he doesn’t think a Jurassic Park situation is imminent, he does think that genetic resurrection poses an interesting possibility for species at risk of extinction.
“I don’t think [recreating Jurassic Park] is a possibility, at least according to what I’ve read. We just don’t have the genes available from those organisms. I do think that it may be possible to bring back species that are more recently extinct. There’s been a project going on where they’ve either been collecting whole organisms or tissues samples from endangered species and keeping them in a cryogenic facility for just this purpose,” said Arena.
Genetic resurrection does give some hope to conservationists for saving species at risk of going extinct or for those who have been recently announced as extinct. Some endangered species play vital roles in their ecosystems, and if brought back could play a huge part in combating climate change.
However, for species like the woolly mammoth, there’s still uncertainty about what bringing it back into ecosystems would look like.
“I think that’s a huge question mark that we don’t really know. Now, some of the proponents of this have suggested that the woolly mammoth was responsible for maintaining certain environments. For instance, boreal forests, when woolly mammoths were around, were still mostly prairie. It was their role to help keep it as a prairie and when they disappeared it shifted to a boreal forest,” said Arena.
He went on to explain that in order to create an environment similar to the one a woolly mammoth might have known would require things like cutting down boreal forests in hopes that the species would then maintain the prairie once again. Even though there has been evidence that prairie ecosystems are able to absorb carbon dioxide better, the destruction of the boreal forest raises the question of what will be done with the organisms that are now currently inhabiting it.
“For me, there’s just so many unanswered questions. Of course, it’s still a very alluring concept. We bring this thing back, but the second really big question is, should we?” said Arena.
