Jurassic Park dream moves closer
The gastric brooding frog is no regular frog. Like some horror story of ancient myth, it gives birth out of its mouth. After incubating fertilized eggs in its stomach, it literally vomits up its offspring at the moment of birth, having cleverly used its stomach as a temporary uterus.
Rather, it used to do this. The Australian amphibian was discovered in the 1970s, and by the mid 1980s, it had gone the way of 99 per cent of the four billion species that have roamed this planet. It went extinct, mostly because of a fungus introduced to its habitat by people.
Its end, however, marked a beginning of sorts: The death of the last gastric brooding frog almost exactly coincided with the first conference, in 1983, of the Extinct DNA Study Group, which produced a paper on recovering dinosaur DNA from blood-sucking insects preserved in amber, which made its way into the imagination of sci-fi writer Michael Crichton, and from there into popular culture as Jurassic Park.
Today, the gastric brooding frog is a prime target of the “Lazarus Project” of Michael Archer, a paleontologist at University of New South Wales, who has injected its frozen DNA into the embryo of a related frog, hoping to create a hybrid.
Similar work is happening on the woolly mammoth, via the novel gene editing technique known as CRISPR, and on aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle, as Canadian science journalist Britt Wray describes in her forthcoming book Rise of the Necrofauna.
At the extremes, she writes, pioneering geneticists like George Church of Harvard University are even speculating about recreating extinct members of the genus homo, of which humans are a part.
As Wray quotes him: “If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp — or by an extremely adventurous female human.”
The technology is not perfected. For example, those hybrid gastric brooding frog embryos have so far not made it past a few days of life. But as Wray tells it, the hypotheticals of de-extinction are coming true, and as they do, they create new moral quandaries and unforeseen ecological risks.
As genetic science moves ever closer to the dream of Jurassic Park, in which extinct species like the passenger pigeon, the sabre toothed cat or the woolly mammoth can be resurrected via frontier technologies like cloning and genetic editing (with help from old-fashioned breeding and surrogacy), it is confronted with the same questions that animated Crichton’s book.
What do we risk? Is it a good idea to bring back the passenger pigeon, for instance, whose flocks once decimated the fruit crops of eastern North America, blotting out the sun as they passed overhead?
Should corporate interests guide de-extinction decisions? There are already plans in Europe to sell the meat of “revived aurochs,” along with their hides, horns and skulls, and even live animals for zoos.
It is worth considering, as the futurist Stewart Brand told Wray, that “maintaining the (corporate) secrecy of the project (in Jurassic Park) is what let it become pathological.”
“We are at a moment where we are deciding what kinds of curators we want to be, and these tools are moving, in terms of their sophistication, really, really quickly, allowing us to do all sorts of fascinating restructuring of species, and also redefining perhaps even what it means to be a species, when we’re talking about hybridization to this degree,” Wray says in an interview.
Already there are strategies for re-introducing so-called keystone species to their environments and studies about what would happen, for example, to the vegetation of the Siberian tundra if it was once again populated by herds of roaming mammoths. There is discussion about whether to focus on the “charismatic megafauna” that attract public attention and sympathy, or the smaller, less charming creatures that do not.
The closer Wray looked at the technologies, and the more she interviewed the few scientists involved in this field, though, the more trusting she became of the overall endeavour, the more skeptical of the nightmare scenarios about “necrofauna” run amok.
But she is “suspicious,” she says, of the moral imperative that some environmentalists say humans face, the obligation to bring back extinct species because we wiped them out in the first place.
“If the only legs (that argument) has to stand on is that we’ve ripped this hole open in nature and now we have to fill it in because of some kind of moral responsibility, then why aren’t we looking at all sorts of other elements of ongoing ecological degradation and trying to rush to solve that,” she says.
For one thing, she says, de-extinction in the strictest, most literal sense, is still a “sham.” Slight differences will be unavoidable. Until scientists can recreate entire genomes from scratch at a manageable cost, they will not be able to recreate an extinct species exactly as it was, both in its nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. They will only be able to create facsimiles of extinct creatures, gestated in another similar species, or in an artificial womb.
“In no way can we ever undo the erasure of an entire way of life,” Wray writes. “Any way you look at it, identical development is just not in the cards.”
More likely is some combination of genetic editing and backbreeding, in which specific features of extant creatures are selected, over and over again, until their offspring are similar to the extinct version — sort of like the way dogs were bred from wolves, but in reverse, and more efficiently.
An awkward possibility in all this is that, no matter how you look at it, there are major industrial and corporate possibilities in de-extinction, which is partly why Wray is encouraging cautious deliberation. Necrofauna may be able to be patented, for example, just as some genetically engineered crops are. (In Canada, in the case of a modified mouse used in cancer research, the Supreme Court has ruled that a “higher life form is not patentable because it is not a “manufacture” or “composition of matter” within the meaning of “invention” in the Patent Act.)
On the other hand, Wray also warns against being overly cautious, at the expense of progress.
Although Church’s thoughts on bringing back Neanderthals might sound like a leap too far, Wray compares the technological promise of de-extinction to in vitro fertilization.
“Remember there are people alive today who never thought that IVF would be a possibility,” she says. “And when that did come on the table, it was extremely controversial, and yet look at how many healthy people there are in the world today, produced by such technology.”
One day soon, we might say the same about the gastric brooding frog. If that happens, though, we will still be left with the philosophical question of whether these formerly extinct creatures would be part of a brand new species, or a resurrected old one.
WE ARE AT A MOMENT WHERE WE ARE DECIDING WHAT KINDS OF CURATORS WE WANT TO BE.