Inside the multimillion-dollar plan to bring back extinct Tasmanian tiger

Scientists in Australia and the US are launching a multimillion-dollar project to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction.

The last-known member of the carnivorous marsupial species – officially known as a thylacine – died in a zoo in 1936, but researchers believe the creature could be recreated using stem cells and gene-editing technology, said Australian Geographic.

“I now believe that in ten years’ time we could have our first living baby thylacine,” said Professor Andrew Pask, who is leading the $10m project at the University of Melbourne in partnership with the Texas-based company Colossal.

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How it could work

The scientists will begin by trying to build a complete genome. Liam Mannix, national science reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, said the team will combine thylacine DNA with that from the fat-tailed dunnart, a mouse-sized marsupial that is the tiger’s closest living relative.

The next challenge will be to get the genome inside a stem cell and prompt the stem cell to become an embryo. Then, the embryo would be nurtured in a womb into a baby tiger, which will need to be “raised to adulthood – alone, as the only living example of its species”.

‘Fairytale science’

Some scientists doubt whether the project can – or even should – succeed. “De-extinction is a fairytale science,” Associate Professor Jeremy Austin from the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA told the Sydney Morning Herald. He dismissed the project as “more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science”.

Hudson Institute’s Professor Alan Trounson also cast doubt on the chances of bringing back the Tasmanian tiger. “Them fellas are lost, it seems,” he said.

But Dr Mike Westerman, an expert in marsupial DNA at La Trobe University, questioned the long-term practicality of the plan. “Where on earth would a self-sustaining population be maintained?” he asked.

Colossal also faced scepticism last year with its plan to use similar gene-editing technology to bring the woolly mammoth back to life, a target it has yet to realise.

The New York Times said the plan raised “serious ethical questions”, including whether it would be “humane to produce an animal whose biology we know so little about” and who would ultimately be making the decisions about whether the tigers could be “set loose”.

Extinction crisis

The project is expected to take at least ten years to complete. If successful, it would “mark the first ‘de-extinction event in history” and “represent a remarkable achievement for the researchers attempting it”, said the BBC.

The longer-term plan would be to introduce the animal in a controlled setting on private land in Tasmania with an ultimate goal of returning it to the wild. The researchers said returning an apex predator to the state could help rebalance its ecosystem.

Pask said he hoped the project could also have a wider impact in helping to address an extinction crisis. With the planet changing too rapidly for existing conservation techniques to save many threatened species, “we have to look at other technologies and novel ways to do that if we want to stop this biodiversity loss”, he told The Guardian.

However, noted Scientific American, critics fear that the “glamour of de-extinction will rob attention and funding from conservation projects”. A 2017 study found that allocating sums to existing endangered species programmes rather than giving the same amount of money to de-extinction efforts would mean about two to eight times more species could be saved.