Hammond
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” And so the most famous line from the most famous genetic engineering story comes to life. It may be that despite the 30 years of annual viewing and critique, we have not learnt from John Hammond’s mistakes.
In 2022, a financially struggling project was given the sponsorship injection that guaranteed its survival in the lab. The University of Melbourne’s Tigrr lab has been reinvigorated to pursue the de-extinction of the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger.
Thylacines were native to the Australian mainland, Tasmania, and New Guinea, and are actually marsupials, not felidae and not mammals. There may have been around 5,000 remaining in the wild at the point of colonisation in Australia, with those hunted to extinction as a result of the perceived threat to livestock farming.
Now thanks to the Tigrr lab, they may be on their way back into the Australian wild within the next decade.
The problem with the theory of de-extinction of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, highlighted by chaotician Dr Ian Malcolm, is that the dinosaurs were chosen by nature to become extinct and what nature has chosen to do should remain. Dinosaurs were not driven to extinction by man-made climate change or by hunting, like the thylacine was. Thylacines are extinct because of an unnatural process of forced extinction by way of man-made animal farming devastation and colonisation. This may give the ethical green-light to reintroducting them into their habitat. But, has their habitat changed in the years since their disappearance?
Over the last 100 years the Earth’s temperature has risen by around 1 degree celcius and Tasmania in particular has experienced more hot temperatures and a decrease in rainfall. And there are now five times as many people living on the island.
Salmon farming too has had a huge environmental impact on Tasmanian wildlife, with seals becoming more attracted to shorelines where industrial factory farmed salmon are raised. Seals are routinely slaughtered to prevent them from becoming a financial burden on the farms. How might these thylacine-absent developments impact the ability of the thylacine the reacclimatise to the environment, and the Tasmanian environment to accept the reintroduction of an extinct species?
Wild viruses too can have an impact as they may have developed in a way that the thylacine will not have become naturally accustomed to. Viruses will have impacted their species during their existance, but as we have seen in the evolution of the 1918 flu virus in humans and it’s mutations, many things can dramatically change practically where it theoretically appears there may only be a small impact.
Inbreeding, genetic diversity, predator hierarchy, and food availability are other obvious considerations, but there are also an infinite number of considerations which will not be assessed until they occur, when it is too late.
We have seen time and again how a reintroduced species has impacted the environment to varying successes. Siberian tigers have increased in the wild from around 40 in the 1940s to around 500 in the 2010s, however pandas have encountered significant issues in their attempt to adapt back into the wild.
The environment is so incredibly complex that, despite how much we have, are, and will study it, we still do not have an adequate understanding of how each element interplays with each other. ‘The butterfly effect’ is the most famous of these explanations. The basic version is that a butterfly may flap it’s wings in one part of the world which triggers a series of events causing rain instead of sunshine in another part of the world. Or, as Alan Turing so eloquently stated, “The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.”
Humans are consistently short-sighted when it comes to the natural world and, in particular, animals. When trying to find a solution to control wild rabbits in Australia, the CSIRO introduced calicivirus into a test population on an island off the coast of South Australia. However, unconsidered by the researchers, the virus escaped the island and began to devastate the rabbit populations across Australia, both in wild rabbits and domestic rabbits. (It is worth noting that the CSIRO still claims that the virus escape “did the job it was predicted and intended to do, without any adverse impacts”, despite the virus being the dominant cause of deaths in domestic rabbits which was not predicted by the researchers in their initial trial stages.)
How might the reintroduction of the thylacine be received when they act inconsistently with our expectations? Might farmers again resort to hunting them to protect their animals? How might the re-established food chain realign to accommodate an apex predator? How might the thylacine adapt to new strains of viruses and modern natural environments?
Despite our arrogance when it comes to research of the natural world, most initiatives by humans lead to significant changes which leaves us chasing our tails to catch up or correct the error. As Dr Ian Malcolm warned the creators of Jurassic Park, “life will find a way”. It is likely that despite the assurance and reassurances researchers exclaim, they will not have thought of everything. They can’t possibly in a complex environment consider every scenario.
Instead of attempting to correct our mistakes, we should apply our effort to avoiding any more or making existing ones worse. It is better to let sleeping thylacines lie.
