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Moral Issues
De-Extinction: Bringing Back Beasts or Playing God?
John Kennedy Philip revives the ethical debate around resurrecting species.
Imagine the chilling howl of a dire wolf – a sound swallowed by time over ten thousand years ago – echoing through a modern forest. Sounds like fantasy – maybe something straight out of Game of Thrones? But this isn’t fantasy anymore. Welcome to the world of de-extinction, the cutting edge (or perhaps the unnerving edge?) of science resurrecting vanished species using powerful gene-editing tools. With well-preserved DNA from fossils giving us a clear blueprint, the dire wolf is a star candidate. Yet, as scientists inch closer to making species resurrection real, a massive question hangs heavy: Is this incredible progress, or are we getting dangerously close to playing God?
CRISPR: The Science Behind the Second Coming
How does this whole species resurrection thing actually work on a technical level? Well, the key is CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) – a gene-editing technology that’s been making waves.
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