Slashdot Mirror
Berkeley Scientists Plan To 'Jurassic Park' Some Extinct Pigeons Back To Life
phenopticon writes "Researchers at Berkeley are attempting to revive the extinct passenger pigeon in order to set up a remote island theme park full of resurrected semi-modern extinct animals. (Well, maybe not that last part.) Quoting: 'About 1,500 passenger pigeons inhabit museum collections. They are all that's left of a species once perceived as a limitless resource. The birds were shipped in boxcars by the tons, sold as meat for 31 cents per dozen, and plucked for mattress feathers. But in a mere 25 years, the population shrank from billions to thousands as commercial hunters decimated nesting flocks. Martha, the last living bird, took her place under museum glass in 1914. ... Ben Novak doesn't believe the story should end there. The 26-year-old genetics student is convinced that new technology can bring the passenger pigeon back to life. "This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense," he says. Novak spent the last five years working to decipher the bird's genes, and now he has put his graduate studies on hold to pursue a goal he'd once described in a junior high school fair presentation: de-extinction. ... Using next-generation sequencing, scientists identified the passenger pigeon's closest living relative: Patagioenas fasciata, the ubiquitous band-tailed pigeon of the American west. This was an important step. The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums' passenger pigeons don't overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order."
"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
While I'd like to restore an extinct species, this sort of thing is outright irresponsible.
As irresponsible as wiping them out without thinking of the ramifications?
No sig today...
God creates pigeons. God destroys pigeons. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates pigeons. Pigeons destroy Man. Pigeons inherit the Earth.
The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000
...yet there's a media panic if the supply of Twinkies looks like it's in danger.
Priorities, people.
Holy shit! I didn't know about this. So we've finally hunted the Twinkies into extinction? How may breeding pairs of Twinkies are left?
According to Wikipedia, attempts at preserving the last surviving Passenger Pigeons in the late 1800s failed because these birds only breed in extremely large groups. So unless they clone about 10,000 of them in one go, there won't be enough of them to prevent re-extinction.
Holy shit I WAS making that up!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!