How we plan to de-extinct the Dodo bird
colossal.com
colossal.com
However I'm getting a little cynical/skeptical when Colossal announces new species to their roster without announcing progress on the other ones, especially given my understanding that mammoths are supposed to be one of the easiest (relatively). I'm guessing the Nicobar pigeon to the dodo is much farther than the elephant to the mammoth, and I think Shapiro thought there was something fundamentally more difficult about working with eggs as well.
This page is pretty heavy on pretty graphics and history and pretty light on recent technological breakthroughs that would make this more feasible.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/09/28/cia-extinction-woolly-ma...
There is also this one: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-the-oxford-dodo
[1] https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...
> Shapiro said that she had already completed a key first step in the project — fully sequencing the dodo’s genome from ancient DNA — based on genetic material extracted from dodo remains in Denmark.
> The next step was to compare the genetic information with the dodo’s closest bird relatives in the pigeon family — the living Nicobar pigeon, and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, a giant flightless pigeon that once lived on an island close to Mauritius. It’s a process which would allow them to narrow down which mutations in the genome “make a dodo a dodo,” Shapiro said.
(https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/31/world/dodo-bring-back-fro...)
From a technology perspective - due to recent advancements in ancient genome sequencing and synthetic biology methods - I find it's a good time to start such a project. Also note that lots of avian genomes have been sequenced in the last years.
It's way better to start with something small and non-mammalian!
The pattern is: find a hot topic, hire Maven to make a nice website, raise on hype, find an exit or get booted.
I don't doubt the team actually working on things is talented. I hope they can pull it off.
Well, that worked from me. I did not dig into the "how" (yet), but I immediately said to myself "wow, nice layout and general design"
I spend $20M on lab time and experts to clone a dodo... Then I lease that dodo to zoos for $2000/day... and in the dodo's lifespan I will never make a profit...
Or I spend $30M to clone two dodo's - one male, and one female. I then breed 100 more dodo's from that initial pair. I then rent them to zoos around the world, at perhaps $200/day (lower price because there is no exclusivity anymore). Even this plan is dubiously profitable, considering my rental income will only slowly ramp up over 20 years as dodos are born...
What would the business model look like for going fishing with your friends?
Some people want to wear diamonds and dine at posh restaurants, some want to do gardening and write books on it, some want to revive extinct birds; it's not a means, it's an end.
I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a "business model" here.
[1]: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/01/...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/colossal-biosciences-secures-...
Maybe the plan is to make money off the technology they create to do this and let the dodos do whatever dodos do?
* To be clear, I don't think the idea of a "PR stunt" is a bad thing, just that they are unlikely to consider the Dodo the profitability endpoint. Maybe they intend to build a park of extinct animals on an island somewhere and charge people huge fees to visit....
Well for one thing it would definitely not involve $20M+ in up front costs..
I'm not sure what your point is. Guided fishing trips is a pretty well established business model. It is a very different business model from de-extinction. (To be clear i don't agree with the grand parent either, i think its plausible albeit hard to get a succesful business model around ultra rare items).
Keep breeding dodos and then charge a million dollars a weekend to anyone who can afford it to go hunt them, and your initial $30m is likely recouped within the first year
I hear them suckers are delicious. Also, their population's kinda low.
If you do a limited tour of the top 20 cities in the USA (population 35 million, you only need 1% of people to attend)
Not totally unreasonable, though I think you’d have better luck with something like a wooly mammoth.
VC money would rain down upon you like mana from heaven and the publicity would garner your company so many indirect financial rewards that you could later move on to all sorts of things. Not to mention the IP and patent rights you'd presumably create along the way with your cloning process and related procedures for future profitable use.
Also, there is a fun movie by Aardman Animations about Charles Darwin and a band of pirates whose captain keeps the last remaining dodo as a pet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...!
Genetic engineering technology has a large potential market in healthcare, agriculture, the chemical industry, and elsewhere.
Obviously, all those will be siblings, so your chance of getting much of another generation is low.
It seems tenuous to me. But I believe that's their stated plan.
They swore that they were generating innovations for good, to license to worthy businesses. No patent trolling.
Then they became a patent troll.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.
"But there aren't any heads..."
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
"ugly creatures who excreted slimy, foul-smelling residue, and whose multiple mouths ground incessantly on garbage"
You’re off to a good start to serving an historically unserved market.
I read somewhere that roasted dodos are delicious.
Thanks for calling this out in plain English.
To the extent my earlier comment is "funny", it's nervous-laughter funny which says something like "this is inhumane and probably immoral and its logical absurdity strongly suggests we should change our behavior to protect sentient species from such things coming to pass."
The return is that Dodo's are no longer extinct. That could still turn into an operation that "makes money" if only to pay a wage for those involved, but with investors not looking for a monetary return. Obviously more care is needed to make sure it's legitimate since economics doesn't naturally validate such propositions.
sigh
We have exterminated a species. It's not going to be the last. We need this technology now to insure against further biosphere collapse. We are probably not going to be able to backup the entire biosphere, but we should start somewhere.
Governments should be doing this. What's the business model of the military?
To protect the currency.
yawn, sigh (whatever other passive-aggressive bodily functions you can imagine).
99% percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. The biosphere is not some pathetic weak, non resilient, piece of glass that you think it is. We can easily lose a lot more species and the biosphere would be just fine.
> We have exterminated a species.
We are not some outside influence/cancer on the planet. We ARE nature, and nature is survival of the fittest, we are fit, dodos are not.
2- Once the technique becomes reliable, clone pets for rich people.
3- Profit!
...then, one day, possibly also human organs for transplants.
Once you got a nice little operation going, you can then start selling Dodo eggs as well.
Dodos scale like software and streaming platforms and need to be pitched like one.
Most of the cost is up front, and the cost for the next marginal dodo user is very small. Cost to make a dodo is $3 and I can sell them for $33.
We plan to disrupt the dog and cat market. There are currently 80M pet dogs and 60M pet cats in the US. If we capture 50% of this market, that would be 70M dodos.
This gives a projected ~210 Million annual recurring revenue in the US alone.
As growth company, we foresee a price to earnings of 40x at this point, which would put us at market cap of 8.5 billion.
If I sell you 49% of the company for your 30M startup cost, this would represent a 28000% return on investment for you.
Think about how China manages pandas with zoos around the world. The pandas in my hometown zoo got a lot of press and attention. I've never seen them, but their names are generally common knowledge. Struggle to remember the names of some of my friends' kids, but I can remember bloody Wang Wang and Fu Ni.
The zoo idea didn't seem to stack up to me and my friends so our consensus was his idea was to generate hype and exit, possibly licensing some of the tech developed along the way.
Serve dodo as an exclusive gourmet meal to thirty oil sheikhs at $1 million a piece.
Easy.
Yet, to expand on points made by other posters, the very existence of this species requires a kind of ecological disequilibrium. Humans will need to maintain strict control over what other species are allowed into its habitat (the article mentions rats in particular). It seems like a fight against entropy, which requires ongoing work, like maintaining two thermal reservoirs at different temperatures. Or keeping COVID from becoming endemic in China (or any other country).
I have always found the dodo to be a sympathetic animal, though. Tame, friendly, trusting. I suppose when you're hungry you eat anything, and once you've killed your first animal for meat, then the second and third become easier, so if I were not an insulated modern myself (indeed a bit like the dodo), then I would maybe have an easy time killing one. But as it stands, I find it hard to imagine, and my impulse is to try to befriend the creatures. "Yes, let's bring back the dodo", I think, "maybe we can be friends".
Maybe that's not a horrible ecological niche. Dogs are not totally incapable creatures, but in America they live almost exclusively as domesticated pets. In a way, the same may be true of humans, who are all utterly dependent on the rest of society. Perhaps the dodo, who will live at the mercy of peoples' tastes, will not be so different from many of us.
The wikipedia article is good too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rat#Alberta
One big thing is that it is too cold in Alberta for most rats to survive. The only one that's very viable is the Norway rat, and even then it's too cold for them to live outside all year round - so if you can keep them out of structures you can eliminate them entirely. Once the initial kill-off was done (which was accomplished with ludicrous amounts of poison), it's mostly about protecting the provincial border.
Here's a more academic rendition: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
People there take it seriously. One town formed a posse when they found an infestation and killed them with brooms and sticks: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/neighbourhood-posse-stomps-ou...
Fun article about a Wikipedia revision war about the territory of the brown rat: https://crackmacs.ca/lifestyle/rats-in-alberta/
That article is two years old. The revision war is ongoing today: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brown_rat_distributi...
Criticizing is easy: what would you pick that is better?
2 years to see if your experiment was successful vs 30 days.
Is that an accurate assessment?
At some point you get into philosophical debates about whether dodosity can be defined.
This is the part that's sticky. We can't test against a reference implementation, so the only comparison we can make is to a relative handful of 16th- and 17th-century observations. This is a bird, for example, where there is apparently only a single written description of its nest. It would be difficult to make a convincing argument that we know enough about the dodo to assert the behaviors of the new animal aren't just coming from whatever animal they use to make the filler DNA (the pigeon?).
> is it a dodo?
I mean, it would seem like it is not, even with a fairly generous definition. I don't know that philosophy needs to enter the picture given that the process itself (as I understand it) can't (intentionally) produce an animal that could reasonably have been the offspring of any of the dodos that more recently lived.
> how much actual dodo DNA
I'm struck here by the comparison between human and chimp or bonobo DNA (edit: the comparison is that we share something like 98% of our DNA with those species). We need basically all of it to land on a specific species. (I'm assuming they don't have nearly 100% or they would presumably use a process more similar to cloning.)
Cloning requires fully intact nuclear DNA with intact chromosomes. You aren’t getting that from old dodo feathers and skeletons but you might be able to get enough to assemble a full sequence.
A full sequence isn’t intact chromosomes so the only way to get there would be to basically apply a diff against a living sample from the closest relative.
Aliens land on earth and accidentally kill all humans. They decide to resurrect humans from chimp dna. The alien scientists have a lab full of screeching chimps and are pleased with their success because the DNA is a 98% match. "Amazing, for the first time in 500 years, we can observe live humans!"
I recommend this book[0] for you, the edited diaries of an explorer of the rugged wilderness of South Westland in New Zealand in the late 1800s[1], who kept detailed notes on all the birds he encountered, including their culinary utility.
He used to eat five of what is now the world's most endangered parrot[2] for breakfast, and remarked upon their pleasant fruity flavour, and recommended saving their fat to cook your camp bread in.
And being honest, I'd be very interested in a family drumstick from Kentucky Fried Moa. Although I suspect they'd be rather gamey.
[0]: https://smithsbookshop.co.nz/p/mr-explorer-douglas-john-pasc...
[1]: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/travels-with-mr-explorer-dougl...
Shouldn't we start by preventing further extinctions? Also it seems rather unlikely that they can scale their approach to 6 de-extinctions per hour...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1213773-wish-in-one-hand-sh...
It is a good proof of concept, but that won't change that we are in the sixth big mass extinction in the history of the planet, and that we are the main drivers of it. And that, after we finish even with ourselves no one will be left to de-extinct us.
In most cases when we are bad its simply because we don't know any better, or because we are unaware of facts. Something has to tap into the roots of our motivation
Thats what the Baha'i Ruhi institute seeks to do
https://hdcommittee.wordpress.com/core-activities/study-circ...
With 8 million species we'd expect one every month or two. Estimates of the current rate are many orders of magnitude higher.
And THAT we can calculate from finding species in the fossil record, and seeing how long we go from the species appearing to disappearing. On average this is about a million years, and it fits on an exponential curve. (Some species are around several million years, others just a few hundred thousand. It averages out.) Which is consistent with a given species randomly having about a one in a million chance of going extinct in any given year. Which then becomes an estimate of the usual extinction rate.
Like all attempts to analyze historical data, there are a number of potential flaws in the chain of reasoning. But this train of logic certainly is not anti-nature or laughably ignorant of scientific reason.
So where do the big numbers come from? Obviously we don't know about every animal in existence, so it's safe to say if we have observed 800 extinctions, then many more than that have actually happened. But how many more? And there is no good answer. The most extreme numbers come from taking a sample of one thing you know (e.g. land snails), looking at the extinction ratio there of known_extinct:known_nonextinct land snails, and then extrapolating that to an estimate of the entire number of species on the entire planet. And you end up with a really big number.
Of course if your estimate of species counts is off, if somehow land snails aren't a representative sample of all species, or any other countless factors turn up to be off - then you have problems, easily on the order of many magnitudes. You end up trying to solve a problem with no idea if you're having any effect at all. In the best case scenario, everything works - and you notice no change since the species you are affecting are almost entirely ones we don't even know exist. In the worst case scenario, we've turned into Don Quixote.
[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
A great number of species have been described by finding a tiny number of members in a small geographic area. For many of them we just don’t know if they are still around or not and nobody is funding research to check.
Who is "we" in that sentence? The human species? Some groups are already trying to prevent further extinctions. This group, composed of different people, wants to try to bring back extinct species. "We" aren't a single group with the same leadership and goals, but a bunch of different groups with different members and goals.
Should we? Extinctions happen for a reason and open up niches for innovation (new species.) Why prevent this?
The "why" is to preserve working ecosystems and biodiversity.
But you can also interpret "currently" on a geological time scale.
https://earthsky.org/earth/early-humans-wiped-out-big-animal...
> Ecosystems and biodiversity aren’t going anywhere.
If we keep up, they are. We can totally destroy the biosphere in ways that would make it, from our perspective, unrecoverable. Sure, it could recover in a few million years with other species, but that won't matter to us.
But we aren't, really. Long-term, we will be fully checked. And it will be ugly. In terms of humans, it's better that we check ourselves before nature does it because when nature course-corrects, it will probably look like a cataclysm to us.
For example, we have dinosaur bones, but very little actual dodo fossils (apparently only one foot and one piece of jaw [1]). The way this project is described, they will not need DNA of the dodo itself, only of its closest living relative (Nicobar pigeon) and closest extinct relative where we have DNA (Rodrigues solitaire). The genome of the dodo will be recreated by interpolation.
Could that work for dinosaurs? Why not? There are lots of living relatives (all the birds, including the famous Cassowary, which some call a "living dinosaur"). We can do lots of genome interpolation, and we can identify the genes related to various morphological features. Not different at all from what they plan to do with the dodo.
Would we ever get actual dinosaur DNA? Never say never. But even if we don't, it's quite likely we'll be able to deextinct the dinosaurs, if we can deextinct the Dodo.
To answer your question, dinosaurs last lived 65 million years ago.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130626-an...
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/mammoth-molars-yield...
Those do encompass a _lot_ of the reason that anything decays, but unfortunately it's not _all_ of the reasons things decay. And over millions of years, the remaining decay mechanisms are enough that you're really not going to have much/any intact DNA. It makes for a good story though.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/world/nodosaur-fossil-stomach...
[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/why-are-birds-the-only-surviv...
A non-voluntary breeding program of sapient beings has serious ethical issues, especially when it exists to assuage a weird sense of historical guilt.
There's this: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-the-oxford-dodo
which is far more than any dinosaur fossil.
Cache egress $0.02-$0.20 per GiB
Getting on the front page of Hacker News might hurt their "pocket's" a bit.
original: https://postimg.cc/GBX9Y8Cq
optimized: https://postimg.cc/23hrNbKM
literally imperceptible
(Hollywood showed me that could be a bad thing. Frogs, Cuttlefish...)
I like to align things (new paragraphs etc) at the top of my viewport during long reads, so this happens quite often.
It's a cool project and it has scientific merit, it's cool to do just because they'll do something that's never been done before, and learn things that can be useful elsewhere.
I do kind of agree that it seems pointless, and their justification seems more moral than it does practical.
The moralistic side of this stuff sometimes seems to verge on nature worship with some people. It seems that we have somehow got it in our collective heads that we need to preserve the planet _exactly_ how it was right before the Industrial Revolution started, forever.
They were hunted to extinction though, so clearly they weren't so terrifying and scary that we couldn't ... hunt and eat them.
Some Mastodon blood was found on some stone tools not far from me recently. Right near my daughter's high school: https://www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/2022/12/31/disc...
That isn't exactly clear, and the last of them lived on Alaska's remote St. Paul Island, I believe once a part of the Bearing Land Bridge, at least as late as 5600ya, and some may have survived on the Aleutian Islands as late as 1650BC, and possibly, though unlikely, even as late as 800AD. The last ones were not hunted.
There's so much evidence of human hunting of Mastodons, and the timelines are co-related so highly, it's hard to believe we weren't involved heavily in their extinction even if there were other (climate/habitat) related factors.
Well to engineer a dodo, another bird has to lay the egg. If that bird is a pigeon, the pigeon needs to modified to be bigger first. Do y'all see where I'm going with this?
Engineering animals is a touchy subject in Congress, but these scientists have latched on a topic that almost no one is opposed to.
The fact that they are attracting money in an area no one will touch should inspire hope.
I have little doubt they will succeed with at least one species. Speaking as someone who created dozens of transgenic animals during a Bio PhD!
This company is only planning to recreate an extinct Dodo bird, and use it to terraform the planet Mars on Elon Musk's future expedition.
TL;DR: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
That leaves 4% of all earthly animals to be 'wild'. A negligible part of the 'ecology'.
We're not going to put the genie of terraforming (reforming the earth to serve human needs) back in the bottle. The bottle is smashed; the earth is one large human park.
Anyway, still we need to try not to destroy the atmosphere and water because they're critical to human needs and processes. That's reason enough.
Ecological niches shifting around doesn't necessarily require that something's wrong.
https://www.doc.govt.nz/news/media-releases/2016/predator-fr...
The question is different when it can be summed up as "to be or not to be", but I think it's still an ethical bag of hurts.
But for that, you need quality breeding stock in zoos in the first place.
[1] https://defenders.org/blog/2020/03/we-were-wrong-about-wolve...