Colossal Biosciences and the US Fish and Wildlife Service have announced a partnership to build a "BioVault" to save the DNA of endangered species. While at face value this sounds like a great idea, it may ultimately do more harm to wildlife and ecosystems.
As Dr. Jerry Coyne correctly points out on his website:
"As more species face the risk of extinction, scientists see such biobanks as a critical backup. But concerns are also growing that the rise of genetic engineering and efforts to revive extinct species will erode support for on-the-ground conservation, which often requires protecting habitat from drilling, mining and other development."
Totally agree.
Firstly, make no mistake: Colossal did not 'de-extinct' the Dire Wolf — it merely modified on the order of a dozen genes to make a Gray Wolf look like one. This is a fundamental error of confusing Phenotype (outward appearance) with Genotype (what's on the inside). You cannot expect to reintroduce an animal into the wild that merely looks like something; it must be, as a complete organism, behaviorally and biologically adapted to a specific environment.
Google the Slender-tailed Dunnart (Sminthopsis murina) and the House Mouse (Mus musculus). The former is a marsupial found in Australia and the latter is a placental mammal found in many places throughout the world. While they look extremely similar, the Dunnart is a marsupial, not a placental mammal like the house mouse, and is therefore far more distantly related to mice than it is to other marsupials such as kangaroos.
Yet, you couldn't take Dunnarts, move them to North America, and expect them to survive. Despite looking almost exactly like a standard North American field mouse or deer mouse, its genotype and evolutionary history make it completely incompatible with the North American wild.
Do you really trust this administration partnering with Colossal to create a BioVault that has a very low likelihood of actually creating anything that could ever be successfully released to the wild?
I most certainly do not, and neither should you.
Ah, you say, they'll have complete DNA! True, but Colossal will likely use the BioVault to gather perfect genotypes today so they can create phenotypic proxies tomorrow. If a species in the BioVault goes extinct in the wild 15 years from now, Colossal cannot just magically clone it back into existence. To resurrect it, they would most likely have to do something similar to what they did with the fake Dire Wolf: take a closely related living surrogate species and use gene editing to incorporate portions of the extinct genome.
The idea of a DNA BioVault is laudable as an archival tool, but it must never be used as a catalyst to dismantle or replace how we conserve real, physical natural areas today.
Coyne also points out:
"Further, if Colossal is doing this for 'de-extinction' purposes, and will retain sole possession of the material, as it will do, then it is preventing other organizations or scientists from using what is 'banked.' The U.S. government has no business partnering with such an enterprise. I don’t worry about de-extinction because that is (pardon the pun) a dead issue. But the concentration on biobanking may, as the authors note, 'erode support for on-the-ground conservation,' which mainly involves saving existing habitat and keeping humans from destroying new habitat."
You can now go about your day.