A Conversion of the Dodoes

February 1, 2023 6:47 AM

By 1681, Didus ineptus would be gone, by 1710 so would every last settler from Mauritius. The enterprise here would have lasted about a human lifetime. ... To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a Godly creation. But now A 'De-Extinction' Company Wants to Bring Back the Dodo
posted by chavenet (35 comments total)

I'd like to thank all my fellow Mefites for giving this article their serious attention so we can have fruitful conversation about it, rather than immediately going into Jurassic Park jokes.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:07 AM on February 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

Well it's not scientific but the Jasper Fforde Thursday Next books featured cloned dodos as pets. Apparently they said "plock," when excited.

I think pigeon was also part of the mix, though some unauthorized clones used flamingo and came out long-necked and pink, and needed a special Chimera license.

Anyway if this works maybe it also saves the dodo tree that needs them to germinate properly?
posted by emjaybee at 7:18 AM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo.

Forget Jurassic Park, a silly clickbait-chasing tech startup like this should draw more comparisons to Glass Onion, a movie about an idiotic loudmouth billionaire who (spoiler warning) turns out to be an loudmouthed idiot.

Apparently this company has also said they clone a wooly mammoth in the next four years. Just like how Elon Musk said he'd put a human on Mars in ten years. Eleven years ago.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:19 AM on February 1, 2023 [12 favorites]

Colossal Biosciences is trying to solve all these problems at once. “Even though we’re nowhere near ready to start implanting embryos into surrogates,” Lamm says, the company currently has a team working on the cloning methodology necessary for that process. It also has multiple teams working in parallel on problems of computational biology, cellular engineering, stem cell reprogramming, embryology, protein engineering and animal husbandry, among other focuses.

Just a infinite series of engineering problems, should be done in no time.

Apparently problem #1 is that we don't know how to clone birds at all, even the non-extinct ones.
posted by Not A Thing at 7:21 AM on February 1, 2023 [18 favorites]

They didn't mention it in the article, so does anyone know what the surrogate species for the thylacine would be?
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 7:26 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded...

I'll skip the Jurassic Park jokes, but can we still make Theranos jokes?
posted by Optamystic at 7:41 AM on February 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

I feel like there’s an awful of good that $150,000,000 could do for conservation that would be an improvement on this plan. I think this is also a clear example of headline-grabbing attention for cute/charismatic animals at the expense of those that aren’t. Surely there are ten “ugly” species of plant or animal currently in danger that could use $10,000,000, the loss of which would cause significantly more harm than the good that might come of the current plan.
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:48 AM on February 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

Forget Jurassic Park, a silly clickbait-chasing tech startup like this should draw more comparisons to Glass Onion, a movie about an idiotic loudmouth billionaire who (spoiler warning) turns out to be an loudmouthed idiot.

In fairness, the book of Jurassic Park (despite being written by Michael Crichton, a doctor with a particularly bad case of engineer's disease, particularly WRT climate change) did have one good bit in it: the billionaire John Hammond (who is much less sympathetic of a character than Richard Attenborough's portrayal in the movie) gets support for his cloning experiments/business by showing off a miniature clone of an elephant, and by "miniature" I mean "about the size of a cat." It's got all sorts of problems with it, but it wows the rubes enough to get money out of them. A company that keeps coming up with well-known extinct species to clone, instead of doing one as a proof of concept (tabletop-sized or not) strikes me as the same sort of really-doing-it-for-the-headlines sort of thing.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:12 AM on February 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

So you say they got Dough for the Do-Do?
posted by SPrintF at 8:26 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's like the old mother's threat, but in reverse: "I took you out of this world, and I can bring you back in."
posted by condour75 at 8:30 AM on February 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'd love to see a movie that's Jurassic Park but it's Theranos with maybe a little bit of Glass Onion thrown in for good measure.

Maybe they didn't successfully clone dinosaurs at all, but in order to keep the ruse going they lure a bunch of concerned investors to the island with the intent of staging a fake dinosaur escape event in the hopes of abandoning the project with their reputations intact. During the manufactured chaos, a would-be whistleblower is conveniently murdered and their death is blamed on the non-existent dinosaurs that are supposedly running amuck.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:42 AM on February 1, 2023 [16 favorites]

Really looking forward to Glass Theranos, whenever it comes to streaming.
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:47 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Surely there are ten “ugly” species of plant or animal currently in danger that could use $10,000,000, the loss of which would cause significantly more harm than the good that might come of the current plan.

My perspective is that almost all large animal species (certainly including dodo-sized) are currently threatened. Anything that got "de-extincted," even if it was ecologically re-established and not just kept in a couple zoos, would immediately be faced with a dire long-term outlook.
posted by grobstein at 9:07 AM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Welp, um, good luck with this. I won't hold my breath.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:10 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe if we stopped using so many fossil fuels and destroying the ecosystem, we would reduce our reliance on this kind of thing. Nah, that would be too simple, clickbait articles on a doomed effort for everyone.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:23 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Surely the resurrection of extinct species is just a front. There's a real reason Randian tech psychos are pouring money into this and given the way things are going, it can't be good.
posted by klanawa at 9:26 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Lamm was interviewed on Supercluster this morning. Only the finest, most credulous outlets for this guy.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:30 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

A-also: The CIA Is Funding a Mission to Reincarnate the Dodo Bird
posted by chavenet at 9:41 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

> I'd like to thank all my fellow Mefites for giving this article their serious attention so we can have fruitful conversation about it, rather than immediately going into Jurassic Park jokes.

Certainly!

I'll try not to fowl that up.
posted by 7segment at 9:42 AM on February 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ultimately, Shapiro says, the final version of dodo will emerge from a pigeon that has been engineered to be the size of a dodo

I feel like the article is burying the lede here. The real story is not the return of the dodo but the nightmare vision of a world overrun by giant pigeons.
posted by verstegan at 9:43 AM on February 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

I can’t wait to find out what they taste like.
(Probably chicken)
posted by Mchelly at 9:47 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Didus ineptus

Taxonomists can be so cruel.
posted by biogeo at 9:57 AM on February 1, 2023 [9 favorites]

“Even though we’re nowhere near ready to start implanting embryos into surrogates,” Lamm says, the company currently has a team working on the cloning methodology necessary for that process.

What a bunch of amateurs. They need to take a page from the Musk playbook and announce that they'll be implanting embryos by next year.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:11 AM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

I can’t wait to find out what they taste like.

Two different accounts on this from Wikipedia:

These we used to call 'Walghvogel', for the reason that the longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became. Nevertheless their belly and breast were of a pleasant flavour and easily masticated.

It is reputed more for wonder than for food, greasie stomackes may seeke after them, but to the delicate they are offensive and of no nourishment.

posted by dephlogisticated at 10:12 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Surely the resurrection of extinct species is just a front. There's a real reason Randian tech psychos are pouring money into this and given the way things are going, it can't be good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Was_a_Man
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:18 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Real missed opportunity here for Scientific American to use the headline "The Dodo Is Still Dead."

Here's a 2021 New York Times article (archive link) about these guys. Apparently George Church (the science half of Colossal) has been making headlines with de-extinction claims for over a decade, but he couldn't raise any significant funding until VC guy Ben Lamm got in touch with him in 2019. Now they have $150 million. It's amazing how much money rich people will throw at you if you have the right connections!

I'm curious whether these guys are good at anything besides self-promotion. I see some claims that Church spliced mammoth genes into elephant cells in 2015, and that Colossal sequenced an elephant genome last year.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:40 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

On the one hand, if there is ever to be a "successful" "de-extinction" of an extinct species, the kinds of things that are talked about in TFA will have to have been solved. But what's being talked about in TFA is not resurrecting the dodo, it's the making of a dodo-something chimera.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:47 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Speaking of dodoes, I refer you to Phillip Atkin's A Dodo at Oxford: The Unreliable Account of a Student and His Pet Dodo, alleged to be a 17th-century diary by, well, a student there and his pet dodo. Is it true? Who knows? The publishers leave it to the reader to decide.
posted by BWA at 11:35 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I for one welcome our new half-dinosaur, half giant pigeon overlords.
posted by Lanark at 11:41 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here's a 2021 New York Times article (archive link) about these guys. Apparently George Church (the science half of Colossal) has been making headlines with de-extinction claims for over a decade, b

Some of the things that George Church does are jokes; but overall he's one of the most successful scientists of the late 20th/early 21st century. IN THE WORLD. PERIOD.

It really is a crapshoot with him; his lab has spawned tens of billions of dollars of real (not BS, not blockchain/vaporware) startups that have changed bioscience and medicine, students and postdocs that worked with him have gone on to lead virtually every academic and commercial enterprise in science one can think of (he runs one of the biggest groups - probably 100 students/postocs/senior scientists at a a time!), yet he also hangs out with frauds and charlatans, does the blockchain/vaporware thing TOO, and does crazy (and occasionally mindblowingly dumb) things. Every 10th thing I hear about him is met by me with a sigh "why, george, why?????"
posted by lalochezia at 12:23 PM on February 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

I mean, look at his google scholar page ffs.
posted by lalochezia at 12:25 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

In the MNHN in Paris they have a pretty sweet reconstruction of one. It would be cool if they existed again. Though it is unclear if this endeavor is serious or possible, it does seem to involve learning stuff that could be useful.

I don't think it is fair to say they are sucking up attention or money that would have otherwise gone to more practical conservation measures, because I don't really think that's true. Everyday conservation work just doesn't have the virality of some crazy Jurassic Park plan.
posted by snofoam at 1:38 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am adding "ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention" to my Twitter profile.
posted by delfin at 3:53 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

half-dinosaur, half giant pigeon

Um, actually…
posted by Big Al 8000 at 8:51 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have an ugly feeling that once someone manages to resurrect reasonably long extinct mammals, like mammoths, then it's only a matter of time before someone tries Neanderthals.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 7:28 AM on February 2, 2023 [1 favorite]