While de-extinction research may benefit conservation efforts overall, we shouldn’t have to rely on it to give a wildlife a future
Photograph: The National Film and Sound Arch/AFP/Getty ImagesPhotograph: The National Film and Sound Arch/AFP/Getty Images. Shot in Tasmania, the film tells the story of a mercenary hired by a global biotech company to find, take DNA samples from, and destroy a thylacine that is rumoured to have survived deep in the state’s wilderness.
When the last Tasmanian tiger appears in CGI form at the movie’s climax, walking slowly and alone through the snow, the impact ofis quietly devastating. The mercenary, played by Willem Dafoe, makes an equally devastating, and complicated, choice. It isn’t hard to find people who believe there is truth in the film’s central conceit – that the thylacine still lives out there somewhere – but despite hundreds of reported sightings there is no scientific evidence that it survived beyond 1936, whenWhat it has highlighted is how little, in relative terms, we prioritise our existing environment
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.
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