Since the 1990s, the endless searches for the marsupial in the wilds of Tasmania and Victoria have run alongside another romantic idea – that it can be brought back through genetic engineering. For years, the chief proponent of this idea was Prof Mike Archer, a former director of the Australian Museum who wanted to use DNA from preserved specimens in its collection. That mantle has now passed to the University of Melbourne’s Prof Andrew Pask, who in 2017 led a project to sequence a thylacine’s genome, a necessary first step.
While the ambition is familiar, what’s new is the cash. Earlier this year Pask and his team received a $5m philanthropic gift to set up a thylacine integrated genetic restoration research (acronynm: Tigrr) lab. Last week came the announcement that the lab had partnered with Colossal, a US “de-extinction” company that uses cutting edge CRISPR gene-editing technology, for an even larger sum.
The reaction to the project in the scientific community has been mixed, and has included some understandable frustration that money is being spent to resurrect a dead species when hundreds of living threatened species are comparatively ignored.
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I look at it slightly differently. As Deakin University Prof Euan Ritchie has said, funding for conservation is not a zero sum game, and the support for de-extinction research has not come at the expense of other environmental protection. It is additional.
