Cross Breeds

Scientists are using cloning to bring back extinct animals. What's your opinion?

Do you think it's good using these new technologies to prevent extinction or does it disgust you? According to my biology text book, scientists have made one successful clone of the Pyranean Ibex that died out in 2000, by using some tissue from the ear of one of them, and are planning to clone more to bring back the species.

Public Comments

1. <<Scientists are using cloning to bring back extinct animals. What's your opinion?>> Scientists aren't doing that yet, as it happens. One or two preliminary efforts have been undertaken, eg. the Tasmanian "tiger", but none has as yet succeeded. <<Do you think it's good using these new technologies to prevent extinction or does it disgust you?>> Trying to prevent extinction is a different subject. However, I'm not aware of cloning having been used for that either. Update <<According to my biology text book, scientists have made one successful clone of the Pyranean Ibex that died out in 2000...>> Sadly, it was apparently only "successful" for seven minutes. Then it was dead.
2. Everything happens for a reason. Personally i think its awesome and a good thing. ^^
3. I personally think its a brilliant idea. Were in an age now were knowledge is power. How do we know if bringing back one of these extinct animals leads us to disocver a strain of DNA within them we can use to our own advantage to help the wider population? Admittedly leaving them to re-enter wildlife may have problems due to their possible adverse effects upon ecosystems which have stabilsed without them so they would have to be kept in an artificial environment to whit we have all our fun ethical problems. But anyhooo in answer to your question no it does not disgust me in the slightest :)
4. Please name one extinct animal which has been "brought back" by cloning EDIT: the Pyrenean Ibex as a species has not been "brought back". One kid has been cloned (from tissue that was frozen when the last surviving Ibex died). The cloning was unsuccessful as the new-born kid died shortly after birth due to lung defects; a problem inherent in many cloning attempts. In effect, the Pyrenean Ibex became extinct twice, that's all. It's still extinct. There is not the slightest chance that a species as a whole will be revived from cloning because a species requires a gene pool which a single cloned individual cannot provide. All cloned individuals will be of the same sex and will be identical in every way (that's what cloning means). So it's not like there will ever be a chance of herds of mammoth once again roaming across Siberia. At best you'll get a few individual animals which may prove scientifically instructive but will be nothing much more than laboratory specimens.