““Biotechnology and genomic data can really make a difference on the ground with conservation efforts,” said Ben Novak, lead scientist with Revive & Restore, a biotechnology-focused conservation nonprofit that coordinated the ferret and horse clonings.”* Scientists clone the first U.S. endangered species
*My very first reaction is to say; “no, bad idea, your primary concern is to ensure the continuance of bio-diversity, anything that detracts from or denigrates the maintenance of sustainability is inefficient (quite apart from being ethically repulsive).” On further consideration that the effect of intervening genetically might (and some would say; “therefore” given my first reaction), be counter-productive is of concern.
Consider the astonishing fluidity and responsiveness of the Gaian systems when faced with emptied ecological niches: instant refill with newly-evolved tenants - instant, that is, if you consider things on the paleontological time-scale. Though with the emerging understandings about - for example - the evolutionary role of the air-plankton, which are now coming clear through genomics elucidations, as illustrated by Zach Bush’s riffs on micro-organisms as rapid-effect evolutionary messengers running about the entire global ecosphere, delivering their messages, with associated useful RNA/DNA samples, we can hope that the repair and recovery work of the global Gaian systems could be even quicker at re-fecundating the damaged planet than the already-understood survival-of-the-fittest process can manage the job. (The ghost of Lysenko resurrects, to horrify the reductive-mechanists currently curating the scientific orthodoxy de jure!! All praise to the Chernobyl disaster as an enforced exemplar of what Mam can do with re-wilding and regeneration, when challenged. )
Too soon to crow Rhis the long term effects on the genetic structure of the local wild-life will (I would have thought), take several more decades (at least), to properly show themselves in the population.
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