An enthralling project to save the northern white rhino is raising challenging questions as scientists debate the ethics of de-extinction

Mattha Busby

Sun 18 Dec 2022 07.00 EST

• https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/18/return-of-the-northern-white-rhino-back-from-extinction

When Dr Natalie Cooper, a scientist at the Natural History Museum, met Sudan, the last surviving northern white male rhino, in Kenya before he died aged 45, she understandably feared the subspecies’ extinction was certain – mostly due to poaching fuelled by human greed for the prized horn. “The sense of enormity when staring extinction right in the eye is difficult to comprehend,” she reflects on that 2013 encounter. “It was fairly obvious by that point that the breeding programme wasn’t going to work – the subspecies seemed doomed, it was just a matter of time.”

But almost a decade later, the…