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MAGAZINE

TheMammothComethBringing extinct animals

back to life is really

happening — and it’s going

to be very, very cool. Unless

it ends up being very, very

bad.

By NATHANIEL RICH FEB. 27, 2014

The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees andremained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13,Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, hesaw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and“fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota,which he was then visiting with a summer program for North Dakotan

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high-school students, had them in their collection, so he was shocked whenhe came across a cabinet containing two stuffed pigeons, a male and afemale, mounted in lifelike poses. He was overcome by awe, sadness andthe birds’ physical beauty: their bright auburn breasts, slate-gray backsand the dusting of iridescence around their napes that, depending on thelight and angle, appeared purple, fuchsia or green. Before his chaperonesdragged him out of the room, Novak snapped a photograph with hisdisposable camera. The flash was too strong, however, and when the filmwas processed several weeks later, he was haunted to discover that thephotograph hadn’t developed. It was blank, just a flash of white light.

In the decade since, Novak has visited 339 passenger pigeons — at theBurke Museum in Seattle, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History inPittsburgh, the American Museum of Natural History in New York andHarvard’s Ornithology Department, which has 145 specimens, includingeight pigeon corpses preserved in jars of ethanol, 31 eggs and a partlyalbino pigeon. There are 1,532 passenger-pigeon specimens left on Earth.On Sept. 1, 1914, Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon, died at theCincinnati Zoo. She outlasted George, the penultimate survivor of herspecies and her only companion, by four years. As news spread of herspecies’ imminent extinction, Martha became a minor tourist attraction.In her final years, whether depressed or just old, she barely moved.Underwhelmed zoo visitors threw fistfuls of sand at her to elicit a reaction.When she finally died, her body was taken to the Cincinnati Ice Company,frozen in a 300-pound ice cube and shipped by train to the SmithsonianInstitution, where she was stuffed and mounted and visited, 99 years later,by Ben Novak.

The fact that we can pinpoint the death of the last known passengerpigeon is one of many peculiarities that distinguish the species. Manythousands of species go extinct every year, but we tend to be unaware oftheir passing, because we’re unaware of the existence of most species. Thepassenger pigeon’s decline was impossible to ignore, because as recently asthe 1880s, it was the most populous vertebrate in North America. It made

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up as much as 40 percent of the continent’s bird population. In “AFeathered River Across the Sky,” Joel Greenberg suggests that the species’population “may have exceeded that of every other bird on earth.” In 1860,a naturalist observed a single flock that he estimated to contain3,717,120,000 pigeons. By comparison, there are currently 260 millionrock pigeons in existence. A single passenger-pigeon nesting ground onceoccupied an area as large as 850 square miles, or 37 Manhattans.

The species’ incredible abundance was an enticement to massslaughter. The birds were hunted for their meat, which was sold by the ton(at the higher end of the market, Delmonico’s served pigeon cutlets); fortheir oil and feathers; and for sport. Even so, their rapid decline — fromapproximately five billion to extinction within a few decades — baffledmost Americans. Science magazine published an article claiming that thebirds had all fled to the Arizona desert. Others hypothesized that thepigeons had taken refuge in the Chilean pine forests or somewhere east ofthe Puget Sound or in Australia. Another theory held that every passengerpigeon had joined a single megaflock and disappeared into the BermudaTriangle.

Stewart Brand, who was born in Rockford, Ill., in 1938, has neverforgotten the mournful way his mother spoke about passenger pigeonswhen he was a child. During summers, the Brands vacationed near the topof Michigan’s mitten, not far from Pigeon River, one of the hundreds ofAmerican places named after the species. (Michigan alone has four PigeonRivers, four Pigeon Lakes, two Pigeon Creeks, Pigeon Cove, Pigeon Hill andPigeon Point). Old-timers told stories about the pigeon that to Brandassumed a mythic quality. They said that the flocks were so large theyblotted out the sun.

Brand’s compassion for the natural world has taken many diverseforms, but none more broadly influential than the Whole Earth Catalog,which he founded in 1968 and edited until 1984. Brand has said that thecatalog, a dense compendium of environmentalist tools and practices,among other things, “encouraged individual power.” As it turned out,

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Whole Earth’s success gave Brand more power than most individuals,allowing him intimate access to the world’s most imaginative thinkers andpatrons wealthy enough to finance those thinkers’ most ambitious ideas.In the last two decades, several of these ideas have materialized under theaegis of the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organization that Brandhelped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.” Among these projects are a 300-foot-tall clockdesigned to tick uninterruptedly for the next 10,000 years, financed by a$42 million investment from the Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos andsituated inside an excavated mountain that Bezos owns near Van Horn,Tex.; and a disk of pure nickel inscribed with 1,500 languages that hasbeen mounted on the Rosetta space probe, which this year is scheduled toland on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, 500 million miles fromearth.

Three years ago Brand invited the zoologist Tim Flannery, a friend, tospeak at Long Now’s Seminar About Long-Term Thinking, a monthlyseries held in San Francisco. The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinctionof Life on Earth Inevitable?” In the question-and-answer period thatfollowed, Brand, grasping for a silver lining, mentioned a novel approachto ecological conservation that was gaining wider public attention: theresurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by newgenomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologistGeorge Church. “It gives people hope when rewilding occurs — when thewolves come back, when the buffalo come back,” Brand said at theseminar. He paused. “I suppose we could get passenger pigeons back. Ihadn’t thought of that before.”

Brand became obsessed with the idea. Reviving an extinct species wasexactly the kind of ambitious, interdisciplinary and slightly loopy projectthat appealed to him. Three weeks after his conversation with Flannery,Brand sent an email to Church and the biologist Edward O. Wilson:

Dear Ed and George . . .The death of the last passenger pigeon in 1914 was an event that

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broke the public’s heart and persuaded everyone that extinction is thecore of humanity’s relation with nature.

George, could we bring the bird back through genetic techniques? Irecall chatting with Ed in front of a stuffed passenger pigeon at theComparative Zoology Museum [at Harvard, where Wilson is a facultyemeritus], and I know of other stuffed birds at the Smithsonian and inToronto, presumably replete with the requisite genes. Surely it would beeasier than reviving the woolly mammoth, which you have espoused.

The environmental and conservation movements have miredthemselves in a tragic view of life. The return of the passenger pigeoncould shake them out of it — and invite them to embrace prudentbiotechnology as a Green tool instead of menace in this century. . . . Iwould gladly set up a nonprofit to fund the passenger pigeon revival. . . .

Wild scheme. Could be fun. Could improve things. It could, as theysay, advance the story.

What do you think?In less than three hours, Church responded with a detailed plan to

return “a flock of millions to billions” of passenger pigeons to the planet.In February 2012, Church hosted a symposium at Harvard Medical

School called “Bringing Back the Passenger Pigeon.” Church gave ademonstration of his new genome-editing technology, and other biologistsand avian specialists expressed enthusiasm for the idea. “De-extinctionwent from concept to potential reality right before our eyes,” said RyanPhelan, Brand’s wife, an entrepreneur who founded an early consumermedical-genetics company. “We realized that we could do it not only forthe passenger pigeon, but for other species. There was so much interestand so many ideas that we needed to create an infrastructure around it. Itwas like, ‘Oh, my God, look at what we’ve unleashed.’ ” Phelan, 61, becameexecutive director of the new project, which they named Revive & Restore.

Several months later, the National Geographic Society hosted a largerconference to debate the scientific and ethical questions raised by theprospect of “de-extinction.” Brand and Phelan invited 36 of the world’s

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leading genetic engineers and biologists, among them Stanley Temple, afounder of conservation biology; Oliver Ryder, director of the San DiegoZoo’s Frozen Zoo, which stockpiles frozen cells of endangered species; andSergey Zimov, who has created an experimental preserve in Siberia calledPleistocene Park, which he hopes to populate with woolly mammoths.

To Brand’s idea that the pigeon project would provide “a beacon ofhope for conservation,” conference attendees added a number of ecologicalarguments in support of de-extinction. Just as the loss of a speciesdecreases the richness of an ecosystem, the addition of new animals couldachieve the opposite effect. The grazing habits of mammoths, for instance,might encourage the growth of a variety of grasses, which could help toprotect the Arctic permafrost from melting — a benefit with globalsignificance, as the Arctic permafrost contains two to three times as muchcarbon as the world’s rain forests. “We’ve framed it in terms ofconservation,” Brand told me. “We’re bringing back the mammoth torestore the steppe in the Arctic. One or two mammoths is not a success.100,000 mammoths is a success.”

A less scientific, if more persuasive, argument was advanced by theethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both ofStanford. De-extinction should be pursued, they argued in a paperpublished in Science, because it would be really cool. “This may be thebiggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction. Itwould surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth.”

Ben Novak needed no convincing. When he heard that Revive &Restore had decided to resurrect the passenger pigeon, he sent an email toChurch, who forwarded it to Brand and Phelan. “Passenger pigeons havebeen my passion in life for a very long time,” Novak wrote. “Any way I canbe part of this work would be my honor.”

Behind the biohazard signs and double-encoded security doors thatmark the entrance of the paleogenomics lab at the University of California,Santa Cruz, I found no mastodon tusks, dinosaur eggs or mosquitoestrapped in amber — only a sterile, largely empty room in which Novak and

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several graduate students were busy checking their Gmail accounts. Theonly visible work in progress was Metroplex, a giant Transformers figurinethat Novak constructed, which was hunched over his keyboard like a deadrobot.

Novak, who is 27, hastened to assure me that the construction of thepassenger-pigeon genome was also underway. In fact, it had been foryears. Beth Shapiro, one of the scientists who runs the lab, began tosequence the species’ DNA in 2001, a decade before Brand had his bigidea. The sequencing process is now in its data-analysis phase, whichleaves Novak, who studied ecology in college, but has no advancedscientific degrees, time to consult on academic papers about de-extinction,write his own paper about the ecological relationship between passengerpigeons and chestnut trees and correspond with the scientists behind theworld’s other species-resurrection efforts. These include the Uruz project,which is selectively breeding cattle to create a new subspecies thatresembles aurochs, a form of wild ox, extinct since 1627; a group hoping touse genetic methods to revive the heath hen, extinct since 1932; and theLazarus Project, which is trying to revive an Australian frog, extinct for 30years, that gave birth through its mouth.

As Brand and Phelan’s only full-time employee at Revive & Restore,Novak fields emails sent by scientists eager to begin work on newcandidates for de-extinction, like the California grizzly bear, the Carolinaparakeet, the Tasmanian tiger, Steller’s sea cow and the great auk, whichhasn’t been seen since 1844, when the last two known members of itsspecies were strangled by Icelandic fishermen. Because de-extinctionrequires collaboration from a number of different disciplines, Phelan seesRevive & Restore as a “facilitator,” helping to connect geneticists,molecular biologists, synthetic biologists and conservation biologists. Shealso hopes that Revive & Restore’s support will enable experimentalprojects to proceed. She and Novak realize that the new discipline of de-extinction will advance regardless of their involvement, but, she says, “Wejust want it to happen responsibly.”

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When Novak joined Shapiro’s lab, he knew nothing about Santa Cruzand nobody there. A year later, apart from an occasional dinner on theBrands’ tugboat in Sausalito, little has changed. Novak is largely left alonewith his thoughts and his dead animals. But it has always been this way forNovak, who grew up in a house three miles from his closest neighbor,halfway between Williston, the eighth-largest city in North Dakota, andAlexander, which has a population of 269. As a boy, Novak often tooksolitary hikes through the badlands near his home, exploring a vastpetrified forest that runs through the Sentinel Butte formation. Fiftymillion years ago, that part of western North Dakota resembled the FloridaEverglades. Novak frequently came across vertebrae, phalanges and ribfragments of extinct crocodiles and champsosaurs.

This was two hours north of Elkhorn Ranch, where TheodoreRoosevelt developed the theories about wildlife protection that led to thepreservation of 230 million acres of land. The local schools emphasizedconservation in their science classes. In sixth grade, Novak was astonishedto learn that he was living in the middle of a mass extinction. (Scientistspredict that changes made by human beings to the composition of theatmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifthof its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050.) “I felt a certain amount ofsolidarity with these species,” he told me. “Maybe because I spent so muchtime alone.”

After graduating from Montana State University in Bozeman, Novakapplied to study under Beth Shapiro, who had already begun to sequencepassenger-pigeon DNA. He was rejected. “I appreciated his devotion to thebird,” she told me, “but I worried that his zeal might interfere with hisability to do serious science.” Novak instead entered a graduate program atthe McMaster Ancient DNA Center in Hamilton, Ontario, where he workedon the sequencing of mastodon DNA. But he remained obsessed bypassenger pigeons. He decided that, if he couldn’t join Shapiro’s lab, hewould sequence the pigeon’s genome himself. He needed tissue samples, sohe sent letters to every museum he could find that possessed the stuffed

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specimens. He was denied more than 30 times before Chicago’s FieldMuseum sent him a tiny slice of a pigeon’s toe. A lab in Toronto conductedthe sequencing for a little more than $2,500, which Novak raised from hisfamily and friends. He had just begun to analyze the data when he learnedabout Revive & Restore.

After Novak was hired, Shapiro offered him office space at theU.C.S.C. paleogenomics lab, where he could witness the sequencing workas it happened. Now, when asked what he does for a living, Novak saysthat his job is to resurrect the passenger pigeon.

Novak is tall, solemn, polite and stiff in conversation, until theconversation turns to passenger pigeons, which it always does. One of thefew times I saw him laugh was when I asked whether de-extinction mightturn out to be impossible. He reminded me that it has already happened.More than 10 years ago, a team that included Alberto Fernández-Arias(now a Revive & Restore adviser) resurrected a bucardo, a subspecies ofmountain goat also known as the Pyrenean ibex, that went extinct in 2000.The last surviving bucardo was a 13-year-old female named Celia. Beforeshe died — her skull was crushed by a falling tree — Fernández-Ariasextracted skin scrapings from one of her ears and froze them in liquidnitrogen. Using the same cloning technology that created Dolly the sheep,the first cloned mammal, the team used Celia’s DNA to create embryosthat were implanted in the wombs of 57 goats. One of the does successfullybrought her egg to term on July 30, 2003. “To our knowledge,” wrote thescientists, “this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies.” But itdidn’t live long. After struggling to breathe for several minutes, the kidchoked to death.

This cloning method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, can be usedonly on species for which we have cellular material. For species like thepassenger pigeon that had the misfortune of going extinct before theadvent of cryopreservation, a more complicated process is required. Thefirst step is to reconstruct the species’ genome. This is difficult, becauseDNA begins to decay as soon as an organism dies. The DNA also mixes

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with the DNA of other organisms with which it comes into contact, likefungus, bacteria and other animals. If you imagine a strand of DNA as abook, then the DNA of a long-dead animal is a shuffled pile of torn pages,some of the scraps as long as a paragraph, others a single sentence or just afew words. The scraps are not in the right order, and many of them belongto other books. And the book is an epic: The passenger pigeon’s genome isabout 1.2 billion base pairs long. If you imagine each base pair as a word,then the book of the passenger pigeon would be four million pages long.

There is a shortcut. The genome of a closely related species will have ahigh proportion of identical DNA, so it can serve as a blueprint, or“scaffold.” The passenger pigeon’s closest genetic relative is the band-tailed pigeon, which Shapiro is now sequencing. By comparing thefragments of passenger-pigeon DNA with the genomes of similar species,researchers can assemble an approximation of an actual passenger-pigeongenome. How close an approximation, it will be impossible to know. Aswith any translation, there may be errors of grammar, clumsy phrases andperhaps a few missing passages, but the book will be legible. It should, atleast, tell a good story.

Shapiro hopes to complete this part of the process in the comingmonths. At that point, the researchers will have, on their hard drives, aworking passenger-pigeon genome. If you opened the file on a computerscreen, you would see a chain of 1.2 billion letters, all of them A, G, C or T.Shapiro hopes to publish an analysis of the genome by Sept. 1, in time forthe centenary of Martha’s death.

That, unfortunately, is the easy part. Next the genome will have to beinscribed into a living cell. This is even more complicated than it sounds.Molecular biologists will begin by trying to culture germ cells from a band-tailed pigeon. Cell culturing is the process by which living tissue is made togrow in a petri dish. Bird cells can be especially difficult to culture. Theystrongly prefer not to exist outside of a body. “For birds,” Novak said, “thisis the hump to get over.” But it is largely a question of trial and error — aquestion, in other words, of time, which Revive & Restore has in

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abundance.Should scientists succeed in culturing a band-tailed-pigeon germ cell,

they will begin to tinker with its genetic code. Biologists describe this as a“cut-and-paste job.” They will replace chunks of band-tailed-pigeon DNAwith synthesized chunks of passenger-pigeon DNA, until the cell’s genomematches their working passenger-pigeon genome. They will be aided inthis process by a fantastical new technology, invented by George Church,with the appropriately runic name of MAGE (Multiplex AutomatedGenome Engineering). MAGE is nicknamed the “evolution machine”because it can introduce the equivalent of millions of years of geneticmutations within minutes. After MAGE works its magic, scientists willhave in their petri dishes living passenger-pigeon cells, or at least whatthey will call passenger-pigeon cells.

The biologists would next introduce these living cells into a band-tailed-pigeon embryo. No hocus-pocus is involved here: You chop off thetop of a pigeon egg, inject the passenger-pigeon cells inside and cover thehole with a material that looks like Saran wrap. The genetically engineeredgerm cells integrate into the embryo; into its gonads, to be specific. Whenthe chick hatches, it should look and act like a band-tailed pigeon. But itwill have a secret. If it is a male, it carries passenger-pigeon sperm; if it is afemale, its eggs are passenger-pigeon eggs. These creatures — band-tailedpigeons on the outside and passenger pigeons on the inside — are called“chimeras” (from the Middle English for “wild fantasy”). Chimeras wouldbe bred with one another in an effort to produce passenger pigeons. Novakhopes to observe the birth of his first passenger-pigeon chick by 2020,though he suspects 2025 is more likely.

At that point, the de-extinction process would move from the lab tothe coop. Developmental and behavioral biologists would take over, just intime to answer some difficult questions. Chicks imitate their parents’behavior. How do you raise a passenger pigeon without parents of its ownspecies? And how do you train band-tailed pigeons to nurture the strangespawn that emerge from their eggs; chicks that, to them, might seem

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monstrous: an avian Rosemary’s Baby?Despite the genetic similarity between the two pigeon species,

significant differences remain. Band-tailed pigeons are a western bird andmigrate vast distances north and south; passenger pigeons lived in theeastern half of the continent and had no fixed migration patterns. In orderto ease the transition between band-tailed parents and passenger chicks, aRevive & Restore partner will soon begin to breed a flock of band-tailedpigeons to resemble passenger pigeons. They will try to alter the birds’diets, migration habits and environment. The behavior of each subsequentgeneration will more closely resemble that of their genetic cousins.“Eventually,” Novak said, “we’ll have band-tailed pigeons that are faux-passenger-pigeon parents.” As unlikely as this sounds, there is a strongprecedent; surrogate species have been used extensively in pigeonbreeding.

During the breeding process, small modifications would be made tothe genome in order to ensure genetic diversity within the new population.After three to five years, some of the birds would be moved to a largeoutdoor aviary, where they would be exposed to nature for the first time:trees, weather, bacteria. Small-population biologists will be consulted, aswill biologists who study species reintroduction. Other animals wouldgradually be introduced into the aviary, one at a time. The pigeons wouldbe transferred between aviaries to simulate their hopscotching migratorypatterns. Ecologists will study how the birds affect their environment andare affected by it. After about 10 years, some of the birds in the aviarywould be set free into the wild, monitored by G.P.S. chips implanted undertheir skin. The project will be considered a full success when thepopulation in the wild is capable of perpetuating itself without theaddition of new pigeons from the aviary. Novak expects this to occur asearly as 25 years after the first birds are let into the wild, or 2060. And hehopes that he will be there to witness it.

While Novak’s pigeons are reproducing, Revive & Restore will haveembarked on a parallel course with a number of other species, both extinct

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and endangered. Besides the woolly mammoth, candidates include theblack-footed ferret, the Caribbean monk seal, the golden lion tamarin, theivory-billed woodpecker and the northern white rhinoceros, a species thatis down to its final handful of members. For endangered species with tinypopulations, scientists would introduce genetic diversity to offsetinbreeding. For species threatened by contagion, an effort would be madeto fortify their DNA with genes that make them disease-resistant. Millionsof North American bats have died in the past decade from white-nosesyndrome, a disease named after a deadly fungus that was likely importedfrom Europe. Many European bat species appear to be immune to thefungus; if the gene responsible for this immunity is identified, one theoryholds that it could be synthesized and injected into North American bats.The scientific term for this type of genetic intervention is “facilitatedadaptation.” A better name for Revive & Restore would be Revive &Restore & Improve.

This optimistic, soft-focus fantasy of de-extinction, while thrillingto Ben Novak, is disturbing to many conservation biologists, who considerit a threat to their entire discipline and even to the environmentalmovement. At a recent Revive & Restore conference and in articlesappearing in both the popular and academic press since then, they havearticulated their litany of criticisms at an increasingly high pitch. Inresponse, particularly in recent months, supporters of de-extinction havemore aggressively begun to advance their counterarguments. “We haveanswers for every question,” Novak told me. “We’ve been thinking aboutthis a long time.”

The first question posed by conservationists addresses the logic ofbringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared. Why gothrough all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?While this criticism is valid for some species, the passenger pigeon shouldbe especially well suited to survive in new habitats, because it had nospecific native habitat to begin with. It was an opportunistic eater,devouring a wide range of nuts and acorns and flying wherever there was

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food.There is also anxiety about disease. “Pathogens in the environment are

constantly evolving, and animals are developing new immune systems,”said Doug Armstrong, a conservation biologist in New Zealand who studiesthe reintroduction of species. “If you recreate a species genetically andrelease it, and that genotype is based on a bird from a 100-year-oldenvironment, you probably will increase risk.” A revived passenger pigeonmight be a vector for modern diseases. But this concern, said DavidHaussler, the co-founder of the Genome 10K Project, is overblown.“There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going toaccidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do itright. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makesthreats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product ofnature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.” (Somescientists have speculated that, by competing for acorns with rodents anddeer, the passenger pigeon could bring about a decrease in Lyme disease.)

More pressing to conservationists is a practical anxiety: Money. De-extinction is a flashy new competitor for patronage. As the conservationistDavid Ehrenfeld said at a Revive & Restore conference: “If it works, de-extinction will only target a very few species and is extremely expensive.Will it divert conservation dollars from tried-and-true conservationmeasures that already work, which are already short of funds?” Thisargument can be made for any conservation strategy, says the ecologistJosh Donlan, an adviser to Revive & Restore. “In my view,” Donlan wrotein a paper that is scheduled to be published in the forthcoming issue ofFrontiers of Biogeography, “[the] conservation strategies are not mutuallyexclusive — a point conservation scientists tend to overlook.” So far thisprediction has held up. Much of the money spent so far for sequencing thepassenger-pigeon genome has been provided by Beth Shapiro’s U.C.S.C.research budget. Revive & Restore’s budget, which was $350,000 last year,has been raised largely from tech millionaires who are not known forsupporting ecological causes.

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De-extinction also poses a rhetorical threat to conservation biologists.The specter of extinction has been the conservation movement’s mostpowerful argument. What if extinction begins to be seen as a temporaryinconvenience? The ecologist Daniel Simberloff raised a related concern.“It’s at best a technofix dealing with a few species,” he told me.“Technofixes for environmental problems are band-aids for massivehemorrhages. To the extent that the public, who will never be terribly wellinformed on the larger issue, thinks that we can just go and resurrect aspecies, it is extremely dangerous. . . . De-extinction suggests that we cantechnofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very,very bad.”

Ben Novak — who trails Simberloff in professional stature by adoctorate, hundreds of scientific publications and a pair of lifetime-achievement awards — rejects this view. “This is about an expansion of thefield, not a reduction,” he says. “We get asked these big questions, but noone is asking people who work on elephants why they’re not working withgiraffes, when giraffes need a lot more conservation work than elephantsdo. Nobody asks the people who work on rhinos why they aren’t workingon the Arctic pollinators that are being devastated by climate change. Thepanda program rarely gets criticized, even though that project iscompletely pointless in the grand scheme of biodiversity on this planet,because the panda is a cute animal.” If the success of de-extinction, oreven its failure, increases public awareness of the threats of massextinction, Novak says, then it will have been a triumph.

How will we decide which species to resurrect? Some have questionedthe logic of beginning with a pigeon. “Do you think that wealthy people onthe East Coast are going to want billions of passenger pigeons flying overtheir freshly manicured lawns and just-waxed S.U.V.s?” asked Shapiro,whose involvement in the passenger-pigeon project will end once shefinishes analyzing its genome. (She is writing a book about the challengesof de-extinction.) In an attempt to develop scientific criteria, the NewZealand zoologist Philip Seddon recently published a 10-point checklist to

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determine the suitability of any species for revival, taking into accountcauses of its extinction, possible threats it might face upon resurrectionand man’s ability to destroy the species “in the event of unacceptableecological or socioeconomic impacts.” If passenger pigeons, in otherwords, turn out to be an environmental scourge — if, following nature’sexample, we create a monster — will we be able to kill them off? (Theanswer: Yes, we’ve done it before.)

But the most visceral argument against de-extinction is animalcruelty. Consider the 56 female mountain goats who were unable to bringto term the deformed bucardo embryos that were implanted in theirwombs. Or the bucardo that was born and lived only a few minutes,gasping for breath, before dying of a lung deformity? “Is it fair to do this tothese animals?” Shapiro asked. “Is ‘because we feel guilty’ a good-enoughreason?” Stewart Brand made a utilitarian counterargument: “We’re goingto go through some suffering, because you try a lot of times, and you getones that don’t take. On the other hand, if you can bring bucardos back,then how many would get to live that would not have gotten to live?”

And, finally, what will the courts make of packs of woolly mammothsand millions of passenger pigeons let loose on the continent? In “How toPermit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental LawJournal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should beprotected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a geneticallymodified organism. He concludes that revived species, “as products ofhuman ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.

This question of “human ingenuity” approaches one of the leastcommented upon but most significant points about de-extinction. Theterm “de-extinction” is misleading. Passenger pigeons will not rise fromthe grave. Instead, band-tailed-pigeon DNA will be altered to resemblepassenger-pigeon DNA. But we won’t know how closely the new pigeonwill resemble the extinct pigeon until it is born; even then, we’ll only beable to compare physical characteristics with precision. Ourunderstanding of the passenger pigeon’s behavior derives entirely from

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historical accounts. While many of these, including John JamesAudubon’s chapter on the pigeon in “Ornithological Biography,” arevividly written, few are scientific in nature. “There are a million things thatyou cannot predict about an organism just from having its genomesequence,” said Ed Green, a biomolecular engineer who works on genome-sequencing technology in the U.C.S.C. paleogenomics lab. Shapiro said:“It’s just one guess. And it’s not even a very good guess.”

Shapiro is no more sanguine about the woolly-mammoth project.“You’re never going to get a genetic clone of a mammoth,” she said.“What’s going to happen, I imagine, is that someone, maybe GeorgeChurch, is going to insert some genes into the Asian-elephant genome thatmake it slightly hairier. That would be just a tiny portion of the genomemanipulated, but a few years later, you have a thing born that is anelephant, only hairier, and the press will write, ‘George Church has cloneda mammoth!’ ” Church, though he plans to do more than just alter thegene for hairiness, concedes the point. “I would like to have an elephantthat likes the cold weather,” he told me. “Whether you call it a ‘mammoth’or not, I don’t care.”

There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widelyaccepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate withone another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions.De-extinction operates under a different definition altogether. Revive &Restore hopes to create a bird that interacts with its ecosystem as thepassenger pigeon did. If the new bird fills the same ecological niche, it willbe successful; if not, back to the petri dish. “It’s ecological resurrection,not species resurrection,” Shapiro says. A similar logic informs therestoration of Renaissance paintings. If you visit “The Last Supper” in therefectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, you won’tsee a single speck of paint from the brush of Leonardo da Vinci. You willsee a mural with the same proportions and design as the original, and youmay feel the same sense of awe as the refectory’s parishioners felt in 1498,but the original artwork disappeared centuries ago. Philosophers call this

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Theseus’ Paradox, a reference to the ship that Theseus sailed back toAthens from Crete after he had slain the Minotaur. The ship, Plutarchwrites, was preserved by the Athenians, who “took away the old planks asthey decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place.” Theseus’ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . .one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the othercontending that it was not the same.”

What does it matter whether Passenger Pigeon 2.0 is a real passengerpigeon or a persuasive impostor? If the new, synthetically created birdenriches the ecology of the forests it populates, few people, includingconservationists, will object. The genetically adjusted birds would hardlybe the first aspect of the deciduous forest ecosystem to bear man’sinfluence; invasive species, disease, deforestation and a toxic atmospherehave engineered forests that would be unrecognizable to the continent’searliest European settlers. When human beings first arrived, the continentwas populated by camels, eight-foot beavers and 550-pound groundsloths. “People grow up with this idea that the nature they see is ‘natural,’ ”Novak says, “but there’s been no real ‘natural’ element to the earth theentire time humans have been around.”

The earth is about to become a lot less “natural.” Biologists havealready created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic codeof countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo,but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecatingpigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the factthat will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction. Thanks, perhaps,to “Jurassic Park,” popular sentiment already is behind it. (“That moviehas done a lot for de-extinction,” Stewart Brand told me in allearnestness.) In a 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center, half of therespondents agreed that “an extinct animal will be brought back.” AmongAmericans, belief in de-extinction trails belief in evolution by only 10percentage points. “Our assumption from the beginning has been that thisis coming anyway,” Brand said, “so what’s the most benign form it can

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take?”What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species.

For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetablesand our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Syntheticbiology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novelorganisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform humanmedicine, agriculture, energy production and much else. De-extinction “isthe most conservative, earliest application of this technology,” says DannyHillis, a Long Now board member and a prolific inventor who pioneeredthe technology that is the basis for most supercomputers. Hillis mentionedMarshall McLuhan’s observation that the content of a new medium is theold medium: that each new technology, when first introduced, recreatesthe familiar technology it will supersede. Early television shows werefilmed radio shows. Early movies were filmed stage plays. Syntheticbiology, in the same way, may gain widespread public acceptance throughthe resurrection of lost animals for which we have nostalgia. “Using thetool to recreate old things,” Hillis said, “is a much more comfortable wayto get engaged with the power of the tool.”

“By the end of this decade we’ll seem incredibly conservative,” Brandsaid. “A lot of this stuff is going to become part of the standard tool kit. Iwould guess that within a decade or two, most of the major conservationorganizations will have de-extinction as part of the portfolio of theiractivities.” He said he hoped to see the birth of a baby woolly mammoth inhis lifetime. The opening line of the first Whole Earth Catalog was “We areas gods and might as well get good at it.” Brand has revised this motto to:“We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.” De-extinction is a good wayto practice.

A passion for bringing a lost pigeon back to life is hardly inconsistentwith scientific inquiry. Ben Novak insists that he is motivated purely byecological concerns. “To some people, it might be about making somecrazy new pet or zoo animal, but that’s not our organization,” he told me.The scientists who work beside him in the paleogenomics lab — who hear

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his daily passenger-pigeon rhapsodies — suspect a second motivation. “I’ma biologist, I’ve seen people passionate about animals before,” AndreSoares, a young Brazilian member of Shapiro’s staff, said, “but I’ve neverseen anyone this passionate.” He laughed. “It’s not like he ever saw thepigeon flying around. And it’s not like a dinosaur, a massive beast thatwalked around millions of years ago. No, it’s just a pigeon. I don’t knowwhy he loves them so much.”

I repeated what Novak told me, that the passenger-pigeon project was“all under the framework of conservation.” Soares shook his head. “I thinkthe birds are his thing,” he said.

Ed Green, the biomolecular engineer down the hall, was moresuccinct. “The passenger pigeon,” he said, “makes Ben want to writepoetry.”

Nathaniel Rich is a contributing writer and the author, most recently, of “Odds Against Tomorrow,”a novel.

Editor: Jon Kelly

A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2014, on page MM24 of the Sunday Magazinewith the headline: The New Origin of Species.

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