De-Extinction and the Genomics Revolution

Abstract

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Spectral ecologies: De/extinction in the Pyrenees

“…In this paper I propose that de‐speculating de‐extinction away from what Ronald Sandler (2013, 2014) calls “technological wizardry,” or “making it mundane” (Friese & Marris, 2014), holds promise for imagining alternatives beyond the “Promethean dreams” of a technological fix (Minteer, 2018). Normatively, de‐extinction is considered in three broad forms of bringing aspects of extinct biota back: cloning, back‐breeding, and genetic engineering (Corlett, 2017; Fletcher, 2020; Jørgensen, 2013; Preston, 2017; Seddon, Griffiths et al, 2014; Seddon & King, 2019; Seddon, Moehrenschlager, & Ewen, 2014; Sherkow & Greely, 2013; Thiele, 2020). These techniques rely on the creation of organisms that resemble extinct biota; whether these animals are authentic proxies for absent ecologies is a matter of intense philosophical and scientific debate (Campbell, 2017; Novak, 2018; Siipi, 2014; Siipi & Finkelman, 2017).…”

Ice and Ivory: the cryopolitics of mammoth de-extinction

“…This reconfiguration promoted by biological and biomedical institutes also served to 'optimize' and control these processes, with new forms of technoscience becoming embedded within the promotion of life at the molecular level (Braun, 2007;Parry, 2006). The notion of the gene as a bounded entity which contained the long-obscured secrets of life itself was an incredibly attractive and easily graspable idea, taking root in the popular imagination and spawning countless scientific interrogations (Fox-Keller, 2002;Kay, 2000;Fletcher, 2020;Rossi, 2013). In the latter stages of the 20 th century, genetic biology shifted its attention to entire genomes, and began to sequence the genomes of different species with varying genetic complexities: the human was completed in 2003 as part of the ground-breaking 'human genome project'; the mammoth over a decade later in 2015, and the first extinct genome to be sequenced (Palkopoulou et al, 2015).…”