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Asked by anon-240764 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 5 Mar 2020.
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Antoine Bourget answered on 5 Mar 2020: last edited 5 Mar 2020 8:44 pm
It is not forbidden by any fundamental law of physics, as far as I know, but it is certainly technically difficult. If the animal resembles closely to a living organism, and if we have well-preserved genetic material, it might not be totally impossible.
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Tom Dally answered on 5 Mar 2020: last edited 6 Mar 2020 2:41 am
This is a topic that’s been talked about in biology for a while now, and it is theoretically possible. There’s actually a whole group of scientists called “Revive and Restore” who are working on developing genetic tools to try and resurrect extinct species, like the Passenger Pigeon and the Wooly Mammoth. There are several ways of trying to do this: cloning and genetic engineering. Genetic engineering seems more likely to work at the moment, and involves taking genes from the DNA of an extinct species (like the Wooly Mammoth) and swapping them into the DNA of its closest living relative (a modern species of elephant). There’s a really good book on this called “How to Clone a Mammoth” by Beth Shapiro. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we *should* bring extinct animals back to life. A Wooly Mammoth brought back by genetic engineering wouldn’t be an exact copy of that animal, it would be a modern version of it. And if we don’t understand why a species went extinct in the first place, or if it went extinct a long time ago when the Earth was a very different place, then we could be doing more harm than good bringing a species back.
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Emily Goddard answered on 10 Mar 2020:
Slightly different, but you might also be interested in reading about ‘breeding back’. Lots of domestic animals were bred for specific traits (high milk yield in cattle for example), but they might still hold parts of the ‘wild’ ancestors in their DNA. By breeding animals together with the traits of the ancestor breed, you might eventually be able to get back to something similar. It wouldn’t be a complete match (unlike a clone), but you would hopefully be able to produce a breed that filled the same ecological niche as the extinct animal.
If there are a few animals remaining it becomes easier — you can hopefully cross these with a closely related species or breed, and then do what’s called line breeding, where you breed members of the family line together to increase the proportions of DNA you want. You have to be a bit careful though, as this can lead to inbreeding if your pools are very small. It’s a legitimate technique though — Cavalier King Charles spaniels and Maine Coon cats were brought back from near extinction in this way.
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