Human beings have extended tinkered with the evolutionary trajectories of other species. Thousands of several years back we tamed wolves into puppies and remodeled a wild grass into the agricultural wonder wheat. In just the previous couple hundreds of years, we exterminated the Tasmanian tiger and doomed the dodo hen to oblivion. Now, we stand on the brink of an formidable new period in how individuals might transfigure lifetime close to us: by pursuing the science of de-extinction, or the resurrection of species after misplaced to this world.
Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist, an ancient DNA adventurer who has collected fossilized bison bones from Arctic permafrost, and a titan in the de-extinction motion. She co-led the Paleogenomics Lab at the College of California, Santa Cruz, was a Howard Hughes Health care Institute investigator and a MacArthur Fellow, and is the writer of the textbooks “How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction” and “Life as We Created It: How 50,000 Decades of Human Innovation Refined𠅊nd Redefined—Nature.” In 2022 she announced that her team sequenced the genome of the dodo fowl.
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