Ben Novak’s pigeons aren’t much to look at. Cosmetically, they’re not too different from the scavengers you’d see on any city street.
But dive down to the cellular level, and you’ll find something very unusual: they’ve been bred for easier DNA editing. These birds are a step on the way to bringing back an extinct species.
Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore, a California-based group that aims to help endangered and even extinct species through what they call “genetic rescue.”
The group is part of the so-called de-extinction movement trying bring back extinct creatures and reintroduce them to their previous habitat. Much of the hype has been about wooly mammoths, but Novak and his colleagues are starting much, much smaller. They’re using gene editing to try and resurrect the passenger pigeon.
You may have heard of CRISPR — short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s a cheap ...
