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
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
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