Editor's letter: Reconstituting lost species

last updated 8 January 2015

Sometimes the most impressive scientific progress throws a sharp light on our previous mistakes. That’s how I read the news that biologists are on the cusp of reconstituting long-dead species, many of which we ingenious humans drove into extinction in the first place (see Health & Science). Scientists are reassembling the DNA needed to “de-extinct” such lost creatures as the passenger pigeon, which darkened the skies in flocks of millions until it became the cheap meat of choice for 19th-century America. There’s hope of resurrecting the woolly mammoth from carcasses found frozen in the Siberian tundra, where a combination of climate change and human hunters did them in. And if that works, why not the Neanderthals? These European hominids, some of whose genetic legacy is present in many modern humans, died out at least 30,000 years ago, partly because of the rise of wily Homo sapiens. So why shouldn’t our wily scientists, who have already worked out a first draft of our lost relatives’ genome, aim to bring them back?

Call me a sentimentalist, but I can’t imagine a sadder fate than being a specimen of a lost species. Sure, a woolly mammoth would be a zoological sensation. But is that reason enough to make one? And what moral quandaries are posed by a mix-and-pour Neanderthal? I hope we’re beyond putting such a specimen on display, as Pygmy Ota Benga was just a century ago—in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo, no less. But maybe we aren’t. Before we conjure up a hominid, or even a mammoth, we should take a sober look at our long record of biological folly.