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NEWS > SCIENCE > STEM CELLS MAY ONE DAY ALLOW FOR THEME PARK FILLED WITH EXTINCT SPECIES
STEM CELLS MAY ONE DAY ALLOW FOR THEME PARK FILLED WITH EXTINCT SPECIES
September 24 2011
San Diego, CA – Most of the species to live on planet Earth are dead. That is just a plain and simple fact. The current population of the planet is only a small portion of the life which has lived here at one point or another over the 4.5 billion years our little corner of the universe has been spinning, and that trend is going to continue.
There are lots of reasons why these species have gone away; environmental shifts, habitat changes, food supply shortages, and natural disaster chief amongst them. 
Recently though the biggest architect of change has been one of the simplest, predation, human predation in particular. The extinction of the Dodo, Quagga (a half horse, half zebra hybrid), the Tasmanian Tiger, or Steller’s Sea Cow hasn’t been a result of some natural shift in ecology, it has been caused by humans hunting either them or their food source. In the last few hundred years hundreds of species have gone extinct because of humans, but now we may be able to reverse that trend.
Advances in stem cell technology, while still controversial, may hold the key to not only reversing the march towards extinction of many species but could actually resurrect long dead animals. While the current focus is on protecting dying species such as the White Rhinoceros or the Drill, future advances may well allow science to bring back long dead animals and perhaps even collect them in some type of zoo or theme park which would be perfectly safe to visit.
“The most important thing is to provide these stem cells as a resource for other people taking some of the next steps. There are only two animals in it but we have the start of a new zoo, the stem cell zoo,” said Inbar Friedrich Ben-Nun of The Scripps Research Institute at the San Diego Zoo. “The best way to manage extinctions is to preserve species and their habitats. But that's not working all the time.”
Such management would be particularly difficult for species which have already been run to extinction. Protecting such environments has, notoriously, not yielded miraculous comebacks for the species in the past.
“In theory you would be able to bring back just about any species, albeit in a slightly different form. We are able to harvest the DNA of currently living species and so we can replicate them quite readily but with long dead species we will only have partial strands, meaning the rest will be a guess with replacement sequences,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “Essentially, we would be able to bring back any
species for which we have DNA or stem cells. Obviously with human populations continuing to expand we couldn’t allow these species to run free so we could create new zoos, or maybe theme parks so that people could visit and see these animals.”
Other species which have gone extinct in relatively recent times are the massive Cave Lion or the Irish Deer, which stood seven feet tall at the shoulders.
“Obviously we wouldn’t want things to get out of control. We wouldn’t want to bring back really aggressive predators because that could be dangerous, but there really is not much that could go wrong with bringing back smaller species, maybe give them smaller teeth,” continued Poe. “I know I would be there for the tour. I would like my kids to be able to see these long gone species from the safety of some kind of motorized transport. That would be a lot of fun.”
The sabre tooth tiger has a nearly complete DNA sequence but no stem cells.
Anna Phillips, Science Correspondent
NEWS > SCIENCE > STEM CELLS MAY ONE DAY ALLOW FOR THEME PARK FILLED WITH EXTINCT SPECIES
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