With the invention of cloning and CRISPR, there have been a number of proposals to bring back some of the animals that got extinct recently enough that we have their full genomes, like Woolly Mammoth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-extinction
When will de-extinction be done successfully for the first time?
For this market to resolve positively, at least one individual animal of an extinct species has to be brought to life. The animal should live to the biological age of at least 1 month.
The animal could be produced by cloning, gene splicing or other means, but it has to be considered belonging to the extinct species. Genetically modifying an elephant to grow hair is not enough.
I do not bet on my own questions.
1,000
1.00Linking this here so you can keep an eye on developements. Presumably this would count if successful
@traders There are news about the de-extinction of dire wolf, but so far I can't tell whether this is enough to resolve the market. Specifically, I'm not certain whether the produced animals actually belong to the extinct species, or just have a number of gene edits to make wolves look more like dire wolves without fully copying the genome. (This older article for example states that dire wolves were not very close genetically to the modern wolves.)
If there are any scientific publications related to this project, please post them in the comments.
@OlegEterevsky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dire_wolf
Talk page on Wikipedia about this is kinda interesting. Don't have a strong opinion either way myself though.
@ProjectVictory Apparently there's already a dedicated page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus,_Remus,_and_Khaleesi.
@OlegEterevsky I don't think this should count since as you say they modified a few genes to express some dire wolf traits - that doesn't make it a dire wolf
@mxbi It would've counted if they edited all the genes that separate a grey wolf from a dire wolf, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
@OlegEterevsky but also, it doesn't seem that they have actually used any dire wolf genes per se, they are just tweaking wolf ones.
It seems that in a real sense these are 0% dire wolf
@JoshuaWilkes I agree. But I can see a similar approach working it they scale it to completely rewrite the genome.
@JoshuaWilkes That is incorrect, they gathered data from real direwolf DNA samples, and then, starting with a modern wolf genome, edited many portions to match direwolf DNA. So they didn't insert physical, external DNA from direwolves/fossils, but they did edit various gene sequences to be exactly the same as if they were inserts from a direwolf.
The real questions are how much of the "gap" has been crossed, in terms of total DNA proportions, and (arguably more importantly) functional (not just external appearance) terms. If most of the gap has been crossed, such that for example the cloned animals could interbreed easily with historic direwolves, then a case could be made for a positive resolution.
@OlegEterevsky in what sense are "these wolves, who share genetic sequences copied from dire wolves, are 0% dire wolf" and "if you scaled it to completely re-write the genome it would count" compatible claims?
If they completely re-wrote the genome, either an animal with a completely rewritten genome isn't actually a dire wolf because the genes didn't actually come from a dire wolf, or an animal with a partially rewritten genome is part dire wolf, surely?
The first of those seems absurd to me, and hopefully you'd agree given that you permit Gene splicing as an option. The question then becomes, how close do they have to be? What is enough gene splicing?
I'm guessing that the Pyrenean ibex does not count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenean_ibex#Cloning_project
@JeffreyHeninger Good example. However it doesn't satisfy the condition that the clone has to live to the age of at least 1 month: "On July 30, 2003, one clone was born alive, but died several minutes later due to physical defects in the lungs."
Moreover, I don't know how I feel about the DNA material being harvested from a still living animal. Doesn't it defeat the spirit of de-extinction? I think it still technically qualifies, but I'm open to the discussion.