The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (49 page)

Rock pigeon stem cells containing this doctored genome could be transformed into germ cells, the precursors to eggs and sperm. These could then be injected into rock pigeon eggs, where they would migrate to the developing embryos' sex organs. Squabs hatched from these eggs would look like normal rock pigeons—but they would be carrying eggs and sperm loaded with doctored DNA. When the squabs reached maturity and mated, their eggs would hatch squabs carrying unique passenger pigeon traits. These birds could then be further interbred, the scientists selecting for birds that were more and more like the vanished species.

Church's genome-retooling method could theoretically work on any species with a close living relative and a genome capable of being reconstructed. So even if the Sooam team fails to find an intact mammoth nucleus, someone might still bring the species back. Scientists already have the technology for reconstructing most of the genes it takes to make a mammoth, which could be inserted into an elephant stem cell. And there is no shortage of raw material for further experiments emerging from the Siberian permafrost. “With mammoths, it's really a dime a dozen up there,” says Hendrik Poinar, an expert on mammoth DNA at McMaster University in Ontario. “It's just a matter of finances now.”

 

Though the revival of a mammoth or a passenger pigeon is no longer mere fantasy, the reality is still years away. For another extinct species, the time frame may be much shorter. Indeed, there's at least a chance it may be back among the living before this story is published.

The animal in question is the obsession of a group of Australian scientists led by Michael Archer, who call their endeavor the Lazarus Project. Archer previously directed a highly publicized attempt to clone the thylacine, an iconic marsupial carnivore that went extinct in the 1930s. That effort managed to capture only some fragments of the thylacine's DNA. Wary of the feverish expectations that such high-profile experiments attract, Archer and his Lazarus Project collaborators kept quiet about their efforts until they had some preliminary results to offer.

That time has come. Early in January, Archer and his colleagues revealed that they were trying to revive two closely related species of Australian frog. Until their disappearance in the mid-1980s, the species shared a unique—and utterly astonishing—method of reproduction. The female frogs released a cloud of eggs, which the males fertilized, whereupon the females swallowed the eggs whole. A hormone in the eggs triggered the female to stop making stomach acid; her stomach, in effect, became a womb. A few weeks later the female opened her mouth and regurgitated her fully formed babies. This miraculous reproductive feat gave the frogs their common names: the northern (
Rheobatrachus vitellinus
) and southern (
Rheobatrachus silus
) gastric brooding frogs.

Unfortunately, not long after researchers began to study the species, they vanished. “The frogs were there one minute, and when scientists came back, they were gone,” says Andrew French, a cloning expert at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Lazarus Project.

To bring the frogs back, the project scientists are using state-of-the-art cloning methods to introduce gastric brooding frog nuclei into eggs of living Australian marsh frogs and barred frogs that have had their own genetic material removed. It's slow going, because frog eggs begin to lose their potency after just a few hours and cannot be frozen and revived. The scientists need fresh eggs, which the frogs produce only once a year, during their short breeding season.

Nevertheless, they've made progress. “Suffice it to say, we actually have embryos now of this extinct animal,” says Archer. “We're pretty far down this track.” The Lazarus Project scientists are confident that they just need to get more high-quality eggs to keep moving forward. “At this point it's just a numbers game,” says French.

 

The matchless oddity of the gastric brooding frogs' reproduction drives home what we lose when a species becomes extinct. But does that mean we should bring them back? Would the world be that much richer for having female frogs that grow little frogs in their stomachs? There are tangible benefits, French argues, such as the insights the frogs might be able to provide about reproduction—insights that might someday lead to treatments for pregnant women who have trouble carrying babies to term. But for many scientists, de-extinction is a distraction from the pressing work required to stave off mass extinctions.

“There is clearly a terrible urgency to saving threatened species and habitats,” says John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “As far as I can see, there is little urgency for bringing back extinct ones. Why invest millions of dollars in bringing a handful of species back from the dead, when there are millions still waiting to be discovered, described, and protected?”

De-extinction advocates counter that the cloning and genomic engineering technologies being developed for de-extinction could also help preserve endangered species, especially ones that don't breed easily in captivity. And though cutting-edge biotechnology can be expensive when it's first developed, it has a way of becoming very cheap very fast. “Maybe some people thought polio vaccines were a distraction from iron lungs,” says George Church. “It's hard in advance to say what's distraction and what's salvation.”

But what would we be willing to call salvation? Even if Church and his colleagues manage to retrofit every passenger pigeon–specific trait into a rock pigeon, would the resulting creature truly be a passenger pigeon or just an engineered curiosity? If Archer and French do produce a single gastric brooding frog—if they haven't already—does that mean they've revived the species? If that frog doesn't have a mate, then it becomes an amphibian version of Celia, and its species is as good as extinct. Would it be enough to keep a population of the frogs in a lab or perhaps in a zoo, where people could gawk at it? Or would it need to be introduced back into the wild to be truly de-extinct?

“The history of putting species back after they've gone extinct in the wild is fraught with difficulty,” says the conservation biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University. A huge effort went into restoring the Arabian oryx to the wild, for example. But after the animals were returned to a refuge in central Oman in 1982, almost all were wiped out by poachers. “We had the animals, and we put them back, and the world wasn't ready,” says Pimm. “Having the species solves only a tiny, tiny part of the problem.”

Hunting is not the only threat that would face recovered species. For many, there's no place left to call home. The Chinese river dolphin became extinct due to pollution and other pressures from the human population on the Yangtze River. Things are just as bad there today. Around the world frogs are getting decimated by a human-spread pathogen called the chytrid fungus. If Australian biologists someday release gastric brooding frogs into their old mountain streams, they could promptly become extinct again.

“Without an environment to put re-created species back into, the whole exercise is futile and a gross waste of money,” says Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute for Social Sustainability at Murdoch University in Australia.

Even if de-extinction proved a complete logistical success, the questions would not end. Passenger pigeons might find the rebounding forests of the eastern United States a welcoming home. But wouldn't that be, in effect, the introduction of a genetically engineered organism into the environment? Could passenger pigeons become a reservoir for a virus that might wipe out another bird species? And how would the residents of Chicago, New York, or Washington, DC, feel about a new pigeon species arriving in their cities, darkening their skies, and covering their streets with snowstorms of dung?

De-extinction advocates are pondering these questions, and most believe they need to be resolved before any major project moves forward. Hank Greely, a leading bioethicist at Stanford University, has taken a keen interest in investigating the ethical and legal implications of de-extinction. And yet for Greely, as for many others, the very fact that science has advanced to the point that such a spectacular feat is possible is a compelling reason to embrace de-extinction, not to shun it.

“What intrigues me is just that it's really cool,” Greely says. “A saber-toothed cat? It would be neat to see one of those.”

Katherine Bagley
is a staff reporter for InsideClimate News, covering the intersection of environmental science, politics, and policy, with an emphasis on climate change. She is also the coauthor of
Bloomberg's Hidden Legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City.
Her print and multimedia work has appeared in
Popular Science, Audubon, OnEarth
, and
The Scientist
, among other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

 

Nicholas Carr
is the author of
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us.
He has written for
The Atlantic
, the
New York Times, Wired
, and
Nature
, among other periodicals.

 

David Dobbs
writes for
The Atlantic
, the
New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Nature
, and other publications. He is currently writing a book with the working title
The Orchid and the Dandelion
, exploring the notion that the genes and traits underlying some of our most tormenting mood and behavior problems may also generate some of our greatest strengths and contentment. He is the author of four previous books, most recently
My Mother's Lover
, which unearths a secret affair his mother had with a doomed flight surgeon in World War II. He blogs on culture, science, and literature at Neuron Culture.

 

Pippa Goldschmidt
, a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, has a PhD in astronomy. Her novel
The Falling Sky
, about an astronomer who thinks she's found evidence contradicting the Big Bang theory, was a runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh. Her collection of short stories inspired by science will be published next year. Find out more about Goldschmidt's writing at
http://www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk
.

 

Amy Harmon
is a
New York Times
reporter who seeks to illuminate the intersection of science and society through narrative storytelling. Harmon has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2008 for her series “The DNA Age,” the other as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived in America” in 2001. Her series “Target Cancer” received the 2011 National Academies of Science award for print journalism. In 2012 her article “Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World” won the Casey Medal for meritorious reporting. Harmon is the author of
Asperger Love
, which portrays a real-life relationship between two teenagers on the autism spectrum. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in science writing. Harmon lives in New York City with her husband and nine-year-old daughter.

 

Robin Marantz Henig
is a contributing writer for the
New York Times Magazine
, where she has specialized in long-form science journalism, with cover stories on such topics as anxiety, death, belief in God, obesity, assisted suicide, and the science of lying. She has written nine books, most recently
Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?
, coauthored with her daughter, Samantha Henig. Her previous books include
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution
and
The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel.
Henig's awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 2010. She is currently serving a two-year term as president of the National Association of Science Writers.

 

Virginia Hughes
is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a contributing editor at
Popular Science
and
Matter
and has written for
Nature, Smithsonian
, and
Slate
, among other publications. She focuses on the brain, behavior, and genetics for her blog,
Only Human
, which is hosted by National Geographic.

 

Ferris Jabr
is a writer based in New York City.

 

Sarah Stewart Johnson
is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, where she studies planetary science and is currently working on a book about the exploration of Mars.

 

Barbara J. King
is a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, where she teaches half-time in order to devote more time to freelance science writing. Her research, initially focused on wild baboons and captive African apes, now includes cognition and emotion in animals from chickens to chimpanzees. Her latest book,
How Animals Grieve
, has been featured on BBC-TV and in other international media. King contributes weekly to
NPR.org
's 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog and writes regularly for
The Times Literary Supplement.
At home in Virginia, she and her husband care for rescued cats.

 

Barbara Kingsolver
's fourteen books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include the novels
The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna
, and her most recent novel,
Flight Behavior.
Translated into more than twenty languages, her work has won a devoted worldwide readership, a place in the core English literature curriculum, and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. Her fiction has been three times shortlisted for and once a winner of Britain's Orange Prize.