Chris Flessas
Mrs. Moon
English 10
18 February 2016
Cloning Of Extinct Species
Many may believe that bringing the dead back to life is a great idea, and no, I don’t mean zombies with rotting flesh, but a newly born-like creature, but it is a bad idea. Not because life may turn into an episode of the walking dead or the next Jurassic Park film, but for reasons like caring about the federal supply of money and the environment. Although de-extinction can be beneficial, it forces animals to adapt to the environment and it causes many problems in time and money, so bringing extinct species back to life is an act we need to stray far away from.
Cloning extinct species does not make animals recover and become zombies, but in turn, it makes the animal return to the world as if it was newly born from its own species in the time the species was on earth. One of the main problems with cloning extinct species back to life, is that the newly cloned animal would have to quickly adapt from their time period and environment to the current environment. The most known case of de-extinction was of the Pyrenean Ibex, which is a goat-like animal from the Pyrenees region. The Pyrenean Ibex unfortunately met their fate when their species was killed off by none other than us humans and the environment. The Pyrenean Ibex that was brought back from extinction went from extinction to extremely endangered (population of one in the world), and back to extinction in five minutes. If the changes in the environment are too extreme, the newly brought back animal will not live a long, prosperous life, so this brings up the question, “Is it worth the risk?” Some people say that since some species meeting their unfortunate ends is the fault of the human race, it is the duty of humans to bring back their species and let them live without human interference. In order to bring a species back to life, it is necessary to extract DNA from a fossil, or remains, or the extinct species. From there, it is required to insert the newly retrieved DNA into the egg, or womb, of the offspring of the closest living relative to the species. In the case of the wooly mammoth, the DNA found in a fossil of the giant would have to be inserted into the egg of its closest living relative, the elephant. If the process does not work, it not only risks the life of the offspring, but it risks the continuation of the living species. If the cloning process is successful, we would surely be physically crushed and possibly become prey for the animal. Due to its giant tusks and ridiculously huge feet, we would easily be crushed by this large animal. In conclusion, this process not only is dangerous to the specie and to continuation of the species, it also is a danger to the human race and costs a lot of money to perform.
The next problem is the amount of time and money that would be put into this research. Yes, the extinct species being brought back to life may be useful in seeing how it attempts to adapt to the environment and observe how it reacts with humans and its evolved species, and there is a small chance at being able to cure some diseases through the newly resurrected animal, but how would we find things about current diseases in old animals? If we resurrect a previously extinct animal from a previous period of time (like the Ice Age or Stone Age), the viruses and bacteria have already adapted to our evolved and rapidly changing environment. In turn, the resurrected animal would give us no information on how to stop the virus. Instead of wasting time and money trying to bring animals back to life and trying to make a Jurassic Park out of animals like the saber-toothed tiger, wooly mammoth, and other animals of the ice age, we could be spending all the time and money on better, more current issues, like trying to find the cure for cancer.
New viruses and diseases are found each day, and it is known that time and money is put into eradication and prevention of these newly formed diseases, but why not stop the attempt of making de-extinction a thing and using all the time and money from de-extinction and putting the resources into more important things like finding the cure for cancer, stopping the zika virus, and making more advancements in society to help the human race live longer and more prosperous than we currently are. We could possibly make the human life span change from an average of about eighty to ninety to one hundred of more. In order to do that we would need more focus on our species than past species like the wooly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, Pyrenean Ibex, and other animals from recent history or far history. Money and time are two major problems with trying to create offspring similar to species of histories past.