Why ‘De-Extinction’ Is Impossible (But Could Work Anyway)

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Exposing the Big Game's avatarThe Extinction Chronicles

Several projects are aiming to bring back mammoths and other species that have vanished from the planet. Whether that’s technically possible is beside the point.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-de-extinction-is-impossible-but-could-work-anyway-20220509/

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Illustration of a wooly mammoth with its hind quarters still being assembled from digital blocks.
A famous de-extinction project led by the geneticist George Church of Harvard University aims to bring back woolly mammoths — not exactly as they once were but as mammoth-elephant hybrids.Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

Yasemin Saplakoglu

Yasemin Saplakoglu

Staff Writer

May 9, 2022

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For scientists studying de-extinction — the ambitious effort to resurrect extinct species —a paper that appearedinCurrent Biologyin March was a sobering reality check.Thomas Gilbert, a genomics researcher and professor at the University of Copenhagen, led a team of researchers who tested the feasibility of de-extinction by sequencing the genome of the Christmas Island rat, a species that went extinct in the late 19th or early…

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