About a year ago I blogged about De-extinction, a process to try and resuscitate several extinct animals, by replacing the DNA in oocytes of existing, but closely related species with archival DNA from extinct critters. You can read the blog entry at this link. Basically my misgivings were the following:
"1)I don't believe that any of these creatures should be released into the wild. Repopulating North America with semi-pseudo wooly mammoths or frankenfrogs? Bad idea. 2)I really wonder what conclusions can be drawn from the possible results of these experiments? Can we ever draw definitive conclusions about the behavior and biology of these "resurrected genomes?" Even the Dolly experiments, using donor eggs from the same species, resulted in adult animals with serious health problems and I expect that using donor eggs from differing species will result in even greater deviations from normal adults.
My thinking really hasn't changed a whole lot, but now, in celebration of Mother's Day, I highlight the following video, which spells out disproportionate contribution that our moms make to our genetic makeup, which provides more ammunition to my argument that these frankencritters are likely, at best, to be little more than curiosities about which conclusions will always be suspect. Agree, or disagree, one thing we can all agree on is that moms are awesome. Happy Mothers Day!
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