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As genetic science moves ever closer to the dream of Jurassic Park, in which extinct species like the passenger pigeon, the sabre toothed cat or the woolly mammoth can be resurrected via frontier technologies like cloning and genetic editing (with help from old-fashioned breeding and surrogacy), it is confronted with the same questions that animated Crichton’s book.

What do we risk? Is it a good idea to bring back the passenger pigeon, for instance, whose flocks once decimated the fruit crops of eastern North America, blotting out the sun as they passed overhead?

Photo by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News/Wikipedia

Should corporate interests guide de-extinction decisions? There are already plans in Europe to sell the meat of “revived aurochs,” along with their hides, horns and skulls, and even live animals for zoos. It is worth considering, as the futurist Stewart Brand told Wray, that “maintaining the (corporate) secrecy of the project (in Jurassic Park) is what let it become pathological.”

“We are at a moment where we are deciding what kinds of curators we want to be, and these tools are moving, in terms of their sophistication, really, really quickly, allowing us to do all sorts of fascinating restructuring of species, and also redefining perhaps even what it means to be a species, when we’re talking about hybridization to this degree,” Wray says in an interview.

Already there are strategies for re-introducing so-called keystone species to their environments and studies about what would happen, for example, to the vegetation of the Siberian tundra if it was once again populated by herds of roaming mammoths. There is discussion about whether to focus on the “charismatic megafauna” that attract public attention and sympathy, or the smaller, less charming creatures that do not.