Saturday at 11:35 p.m. with the documentary “The Mammoth, a resurrection in the laboratory? », Arte takes us to the four corners of the world to discover researchers who are working to recreate extinct or endangered species.
Thirty-one years after the release of the first opus of the “Jurassic Park” saga imagined by Steven Spielberg, reality is about to catch up with fiction. And if it is not a question of having a T. Rex as a pet in the near future, we have never been so close to being able to reintegrate extinct species into our nature.
Multiple tracks
In the scientific world of the resurrection of species, several techniques are possible to play the demiurge in a white coat. The first is the cloning of the last representative of the extinct species. Essential condition for using this method: having kept a specimen of the species in question in a cool place. Experiments undertaken to bring back from the dead, in particular, the Pyrenees ibex. Attempt ended in failure, the clone having only survived a few minutes after its birth. Another possibility is to start from a descendant of the extinct animal and go back to its original ancestor by practicing crossbreeding and genetic selection. “Since 2013, a project has aimed to revive the aurochs, the bull from the Lascaux frescoes, from domestic cattle,” indicates It interests me. Finally, the last possibility is “the technique known as genetic engineering”, details Le Monde. “It consists of sequencing the genome of an extinct animal and inserting the pieces of DNA which make it specific into the genome of a still living cousin species. »
Get up in there!
It is with genetic engineering that the private American laboratory Colossal Biosciences, created in 2021, intends to resurrect the dodo, a bird from Mauritius exterminated in the 17th century.e century, the Tasmanian tiger, a sort of marsupial wolf whose species became extinct in the 1930s and, more spectacularly, the woolly mammoth, which disappeared four thousand years ago. “Researchers are working to produce ex vivo (with artificial wombs) embryos from cells taken from mammoths, released from the thawed soils of Siberia, and from oocytes from Asian elephants, whose genome corresponds to 99, 6% to that of the former juggernaut,” we explain in the documentary. Such a project inevitably raises many questions, both from an ethical and ecological point of view. For the researchers involved, no worries, the reintroduction of the woolly mammoth in the Arctic would allow it to flourish without being in conflict with humans and, according to them, to directly fight against global warming, as relayed by France Info: “ In the past, mammoths played a role as regenerators of permafrost, pushing down ice from this frozen ground in northern regions, which has a crucial role in carbon storage. »
Save the living
If the protagonists of “de-extinction” are necessarily enthusiastic, this is far from being the case of the entire scientific community. Doubts are expressed about the ecological argument of permafrost because, for it to work, enough hybrid elephants would have to be produced. Then, interest in “resurrection” would distract us from a much more fundamental emergency: saving animals currently in danger. This race for scientific achievement could generate a false belief in the public mind: “There is a real danger in saying that if we destroy nature, we can just put it back together – because we can’t,” worries Stuart Pimm, chair of ecology at Duke University in North Carolina. Despite these raised voices, today, Colossal Biosciences intends to continue its research and the scientists hope that their first mammoth baby will be born by 2028.
This article appeared in Le Télépro on 10/31/2024
