“There is clearly a terrible urgency to saving threatened species and habitats,” says John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “As far as I can see, there is little urgency for bringing back extinct ones. Why invest millions of dollars in bringing a handful of species back from the dead, when there are millions still waiting to be discovered, described, and protected?”While I hate to stifle scientific curiosity, the fact of the matter is that there are finite resources (in terms of money, time, laboratories, etc.), and de-extinction to me likely trades off with other approaches that could be far more meaningful.
"Bringing Them Back to Life" by Carl Zimmer
Published in National Geographic, April 2013
Eric
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