Why is cloning not being used to bring back to life recently extinct animal species if we have the technology and the possibility?
In: Biology
1. You generally need an entire, intact, and not soup-like genome. Potentially an entire intact nucleus of an extinct species–which is a problem for anything very long dead. This is often the first step for cloning, and it usually banks on the thing you’re cloning still being around or only recently expired.
2. You then need a host to put that material into. Such as taking an host’s sex cell that you can remove the DNA/nucleus of completely, insert your extinct/to-clone DNA, then allow it to multiply and develop within the body of a non-extinct animal up to birth. You can probably guess this is not a fix-all.
3. If you do NOT do the 1st/2nd thing, you’re probably attempting to step backwards by finding what genetic drift happed to branch into living relatives, and changing those things selectively, pretty much walking backwards on the evolutionary tree in a sense–which is its own mess.
A clone still needs a mum. Like you know, a uterus to attach itself to grow an umbilical cord and exchange oxigen and nutrients and stuff.
You can’t just put a Thylacine embryo into a dog and expect it to come out alive.
several reasons
only 22 animal species have ever been cloned.
you need an exact intact sample of the DNA to clone, or better yet, a living cell to regress to a stem cell. We cant just “take a best guess and write our own copy”. we arent that advanced yet.
you would need to clone at least 500 distinct individuals of a species to give it a good enough breeding population to survive.
You need a living female member of the species to act as a womb. We dont have artificial wombs yet. (a close enough species may be able to work, but to my knowledge, we have never tested cloning in a surrogate mother from another species)
the species went extinct for a reason, just cloning more individuals is meaningless unless we address that reason, it will just die out
and lastly we dont really care about extinct animals. Sure there is the vague “its environment will suffer” argument, but unless there is a direct measurable human impact, no one is going to invest $50k PER INDIVIDUAL (not including initial research cost) to clone an animal species back from extinction
Why did the species go extinct? Does its habitat survive? Has the climate crisis removed its ecosystem? Would it be a better use of resource to prevent extant species disappearing?
The biology is the least of the issue as far as survivability and allocation of resources.
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Why bring back extinct species? Many people seem to think that no species must ever die off and that we have a duty to be their saviors. They fail to understand that extinction is a normal and natural part of the cycle of evolution. Just like individual organisms dying, species going extinct is something that has to happen. We wouldn’t be here today were it not for countless species becoming extinct and other species surviving to propagate evolution over time.
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