“Extinction is an abstract concept to many people. It was to me as a kid,” says Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
But the planet us growing less biodiverse each year. And extinction is a very real and present crisis. In September 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared 23 species to be newly extinct. And many species aren’t technically considered extinct because they live in captivity, even though they no longer exist in the wild. Where conventional conservation methods have stalled, there may be another option, one that’s highly contentious, to pull a species back from the brink: cloning.
“Right now, conventional conservation measures are struggling to keep up with the pace of the threats that face the world. We’ve crippled populations to such fragmented and small sizes,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive and Restore, a nonprofit organization that works to boost biodiversity through what’s known as genetic rescue of endangered and extinct animals.
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“Biotechnologies, like cloning and gene editing, now give us a chance to accelerate the evolution of species so they can actually cope with change and survive it.”
