De-extinction - The Reversal of Time

By: Aiden Kim

If I were to tell you that we would bring back a species from the dead, would you believe such a thing? Many would tell you something along the lines of “that’s just jurassic park!” and you’d be pretty right. However unlike Jurassic park, this technology is very real and may save future species from human related climate change.

So. How did we get here?

An organization called Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences recently metaphorically “resurrected” the dire wolf from thousands of years of extinction. To get here, however, Colossal couldn’t just create a dire wolf from a living specimen nor could they ectogenically do so with a machine (as such technology does not yet exist). Rather, they were able to isolate and select dire wolf genes from an ancient reservoir, where they edited these genes into the Dire wolf’s most common modern day ancestor (that of the Gray Wolf) and implanted embryos into surrogate dog mothers. The effective results were three puppies by the names of Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi which were revealed to the public as of recent.

This process is by no means efficient, and it may take a bit more effort to substantiate certain expired species with new advances in technology, however with the discovery of new genes, gene modification, and forms of ectogenesis, perhaps the many species we are losing today due to climate change and will lose during its course could be restored back to their place in the world’s many ecological systems.