"We're trying to make sure that de-extinction, as it becomes a scientific discipline, moves forward in a responsible way," he says.īorn in 1938, the youngest of four siblings, Brand spent his childhood roaming the woods near Rockford, Ill., a manufacturing town nicknamed "Forest City." His father, an MIT-trained engineer, ran an advertising agency and was a ham-radio hobbyist. "If some entity did not take on de-extinction and try to move it forward in a responsible way," he worried, "it would stumble into the world through different avenues that might not care about conservation." So in 2012 he and Phelan launched Revive and Restore under the auspices of Long Now, which serves as an umbrella organization for ambitious projects that aim to promote responsible decision making for the future. Wilson and geneticist George Church of Harvard about the feasibility of de-extinction and realized it wasn't a matter of whether but when. "I hadn't thought of that before."īrand conferred with experts such as biologist E.O. "I suppose we could get passenger pigeons back," he mused. And early in the dial-up-modem days of 1984, he created a prototypical online community called the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link).Īt a 2011 seminar in San Francisco addressing the question "Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?"-part of a series organized by nonprofit Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded in 1995-Brand wondered aloud about the potential of emerging genomic technologies to resurrect extinct species. That same year he assisted Stanford engineer Douglas Englebart with the "mother of all demos," introducing personal computing as we know it. '59, and the Merry Pranksters were chronicled in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. News of the breakthrough spread, eventually reaching a harbor in Sausalito where Stewart Brand lives with his wife of 30 years, Ryan Phelan, aboard a 64-foot tugboat called the Mirene.īrand, '60, has an uncanny knack for being at the center of things before anyone else gets there. But for a brief moment, the Pyrenean ibex was no longer extinct. The baby bucardo died 10 minutes later, succumbing to a lung defect common in clones. The technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), is more colloquially known as cloning.Īfter 57 implantations resulting in seven pregnancies, there was a single live birth, in 2009. The chimeric embryo would then be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother, an ibex-goat hybrid. But its DNA lived on, in a preserved tissue sample.īeginning in 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists attempted to insert cell nuclei from the final bucardo into eggs from a living goat that had been emptied of their own genetic material. The species had already been hunted to extinction in the wild years before. In 2000, the last remaining Pyrenean ibex, a type of wild mountain goat also known as a bucardo, was found dead, its skull crushed, in a protected park in Northern Spain. Since the beginning of the 20th century alone, 100 species of mammals, amphibians and birds have disappeared forever. Scientists calculate that at a minimum, the current rate of extinction is an order of magnitude higher than the naturally occurring rate. Some estimates even go as high as 100 million. ![]() ![]() ![]() Around 1.5 million species have been identified, but there could be 5 million, 10 million or 30 million. It's difficult to get a bead on the magnitude of the problem, though, since we don't know the denominator in the equation. Where they can be deduced, the causes are also listed and include things like environmental degradation, introduction of invasive species, habitat loss and overexploitation. On it are 709 animals, including 325 mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds, and 90 plants an additional 61 species are listed as extinct in the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains a "red list" of species known to have died out in the past 500 years. ![]() Only, unlike previous mass extinctions, which were caused by things like asteroid impacts and supernovas, this one appears to be largely-if not entirely-the fault of mankind. If that's the case, it would be the sixth such event since the beginning of the fossil record around 540 million years ago. In fact, many scientists believe that we are in the midst of a mass extinction right now. Extinction isn't just something that happened to the dinosaurs millions of years ago it happens all the time.
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