Extinction has a pretty clear definition: gone forever. Or does it?
Advancements in the field of de-extinction are rapidly leading researchers to think about bringing back certain species — the passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tiger, and woolly mammoth, for example. But these projects are controversial for a number of reasons. On the extreme end is the "Jurassic Park” argument; should we really reintroduce animals that evolved and subsequently went extinct eons ago into a world completely alien to them?
Despite what the dinosaur movies depict, however, we don’t yet have the technology to bring back something from scratch (even if we did have the complete genome of an ancient species). “There are severe limitations to just how far we can take this technology today,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist of Revive & Restore, a nonprofit that harnesses biotechnologies to resurrect extinct species and save endangered ones.
In other cases, biologists are ...
