Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 591.68 KOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | 591.68 KOR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 591.68 KOR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Journalist Torill Kornfeldt travelled the world to meet the scientists working to bring extinct animals back from the dead. Along the way, she has seen the mammoth that has been frozen for 20,000 years, and visited the places where these furry giants will live again.
From the Siberian permafrost to the Californian desert, scientists across the globe are working to resurrect all kinds of extinct animals, from ones that just left us to those that have been gone for many thousands of years. Their tools in this hunt are the fossil record and cutting edge genetic technologies. Some of these scientists are driven by sheer curiosity; others view the lost species as a powerful weapon in the fight to preserve rapidly changing ecosystems. It seems certain that these animals will walk the earth again, but what world will that give us? And is any of this a good idea? Science journalist Torill Kornfeldt travelled the globe to meet the men and women working to bring these animals back from the dead and answer these questions.
Author Notes
Torill Kornfeldt is a Swedish science journalist with a background in biology. She has worked for Sweden's leading morning newspaper and leading public broadcaster. Her focus is on how emerging bioengineering and technology will shape our future. The Re-origin of Species is her first book. Fiona Graham is a British literary translator, editor, and reviewer who has lived in Kenya, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Nicaragua, and Belgium. Her recent translations include Elisabeth Asbrink's 1947: when now begins, an English PEN award-winner longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize and the JQ Wingate Prize, and Torill Kornfeldt's The Unnatural Selection of Our Species .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Amid the Earth's sixth mass extinction, a handful of individuals are working to bring lost species back to life, as Kornfeldt, a Swedish journalist, reports in this intriguing but superficial account. Kornfeldt interviews researchers intent on recreating mammoths and passenger pigeons, saving the northern white rhino, and reintroducing chestnut trees to North America, but in each case, she presents only a thin veneer of information. Her coverage of Sergey and Nikita Zimov, a Russian father and son team working to restore not just an individual species, but the entire Siberian steppe, proves the most rewarding and consequential. The Zimovs explain that, as the ecosystem has changed, largely because of the demise of large herbivores, the permafrost has begun to melt-and unless action is taken, by the end of the century, the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from the once frozen ground may "correspond to about a tenth of the total yearly anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases." Originally published in Sweden in 2016, the book has undergone little updating despite dealing with a rapidly changing scientific field. Those looking for insight into the mechanics of cutting-edge science, or a deeper investigation of the philosophical underpinnings of the de-extinction movement, will likely be disappointed. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The de-extinction of vanished wild animals, from the woolly mammoth to the Pyrenean ibex, raises deep questions about our relationship to nature Its harder than you might think to make a dinosaur. In Jurassic Park they do it by extracting a full set of dinosaur DNA from a mosquito preserved in amber, and then cloning it. But DNA degrades over time, and to date none has been found in a prehistoric mosquito or a dinosaur fossil. The more realistic prospect is to take a live dinosaur you have lying around already: a bird. Modern birds are considered a surviving line of theropod dinosaurs, closely related to the T rex and velociraptor. (Just look at their feet: theropod means beast-footed.) By tinkering with how a bird embryo develops, you can silence some of its modern adaptations and let the older genetic instructions take over. Enterprising researchers have already made a chicken with a snout instead of a beak. This obviously adds to the general merriment of the world, and will eventually kickstart a roaring trade in exotic quasi-Jurassic pets. But there are a surprising number of other projects that aim to bring back more recently vanished wild animals, from the woolly mammoth to the Pyrenean ibex. Advances in gene-editing technology promise to make de-extinction a potentially viable enterprise, but what exactly is the point? To answer this question, the Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt has travelled to meet the researchers involved for this excellent book, written with a deceptively light touch (in Fiona Grahams translation), that raises a number of deep questions and paradoxes about our relationship with nature. To some, a few deaths by wolf would be an acceptable price to pay for a more exciting environment The last mammoth died only 4,000 years ago, which means that fragments of mammoth DNA can be recovered, and scientists have pieced together a complete picture of how the mammoth genome differs from that of the modern elephant. In Siberia, maverick mammoth-bone hunter Sergey Zimov wants to reintroduce mammoths to the landscape, while a US professor of genetics, George Church, is working on how to build them, by splicing mammoth sequences into elephant DNA. But why? Church is motivated by the simple joy of doing something new and perhaps even improving on evolution. (We might be able to do even better than the mammoth did, he says.) Zimov and his son, meanwhile, point out that grazing megafauna such as mammoths, because of the way they knock over trees in heat-absorbing forest and root up the insulating top layer of snow on the ground, can actually keep overall temperatures down in their environment, and so counteract global warming. This would only work, of course, at scale: if millions of mammoths were roaming across the European continent, along with gigantic herds of aurochs (the wild forebears of modern cattle) and other ghosts from the past. Such a world is, indeed, what some people want to see, and here ideas of de-extinction coincide with the wishes of the modern rewilding movement, which wants to transform developed-world ecosystems by reintroducing wild animals, including predators such as wolves. Part of the motivation is simply aesthetic, and part derives from a kind of species guilt. Scientists disagree over whether it was in fact humans, rather than early climate change, that killed off mammoths, giant sloths and other megafauna, but reviving them, to some minds, would be a kind of symbolic expiation for all our other environmental depredations, returning us to a prelapsarian innocence in our relationships with other animals. Stewart Brand, the countercultural godfather of hi-tech ecology, tells Kornfeldt: I want the cod in the ocean to be the size cod used to be, for example. People go to the national parks in Africa and look at savannah full of animals, masses of animals and different species. Europe used to be like that, North America used to be like that, even the Arctic had that wealth of fauna. Thats my goal. On views like this, a few human deaths by mammoth or wolf, let alone rampaging dinosaur, would be an acceptable price to pay for a more exciting environment of what Brand calls bioabundance. (Swedens wild boars, descended from a few that escaped from parks in the 1980s, now cause thousands of traffic accidents every year.) And indeed another researcher, who is working on bringing back the passenger pigeon millions-strong flocks of which would periodically devastate local flora in the US sees its role precisely as an agent of creative destruction. (A forest needs a forest fire now and again, he says.) Such visions are clearly based on an ecological nostalgia, a desire to return things to how they used to be and have them stay the same, and thus arise projects such as that to kill off invasive mice on islands off the coast of New Zealand, which is nothing but a kind of ecological eugenics. But other thinkers in the field have long noted that any ecosystem is itself a process, always in flux. As Kornfeldt asks: Why should nature as it is now be of any greater value than the natural world of 10,000 years ago, or the species that will exist 10,000 years from now? An excellent counterpoint to the kind of ecology that wants to turn back the planetary clock is the recent book Darwin Comes to Town, by the Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen, which evinces great joy and optimism in its survey of how accelerating evolution is driving animals of all kinds to find new ecological niches in our cities. A more pragmatic criticism of de-extinction is that it diverts resources from the attempt to save species that have not yet become extinct. But the two are not necessarily competitive: in the case of the northern white rhino, of which there are only two in the world, they may be complementary. Kornfeldt visits the splendidly named Frozen Zoo in San Diego, which since the 1970s has accumulated a collection of cells from nearly 1,000 species frozen in liquid nitrogen. By cloning cells from a dozen rhinos, the zoos director Oliver Ryder hopes to re-establish a sustainable population; or, as Kornfeldt nicely puts it: Twelve test tubes could enable new baby rhinos to rumble about once more like miniature armoured vehicles. The Frozen Zoo also contains cells from species that have already died out: for example, the Hawaiian poo-uli, a small grey bird with a black mask around its eyes. While scientists debated whether to try to catch the remaining birds, their numbers dwindled. Eventually a male was caught but no breeding partner could be found, and he died in captivity in 2004. His cells were sent to Ryder. It was around Christmas, he tells Kornfeldt, and I was sitting at the microscope examining the cells when it really hit me a sharp, intense realisation that this species was gone now. There are no right or wrong answers in this area, but as Kornfeldt implies, the rhetoric of such debates still revolves around a few presumptive virtues that are rarely interrogated deeply. The aim of greater biodiversity, for instance, often cited by the de-extinction researchers she interviews, is never, in truth, an absolute goal. We could save millions of people a year if we eradicated the malaria-carrying mosquito perhaps, as researchers are now trying to do, by replacing them with genetically sterile individuals but that would be a decrease in biodiversity. The fungi threatening to kill off some of our best-loved tree species, also covered here, are themselves organisms, as much as the trees they attack. Inevitably, those discussing such ideas are always choosing one species over another, and judging one ecosystem as somehow more authentic than another not that nature itself cares much either way, being the most brutal engine of extinction on the planet. - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
A survey of cutting-edge research projects designed to resurrect extinct species.Swedish science journalist Kornfeldt knows what everyone thinks when they learn that it may be possible to bring ancient animals back to life using edited DNA: Can scientists bring back dinosaurs? Perhaps not so astonishingly in this age of hyperspeed scientific progress, there are people working on it, including the real-life paleontologist who consulted on all of the Jurassic Park movies and whose dinosaur resurrection project is funded by George Lucas. However, as the author ably shows in her first book, dinosaurs aren't the whole story. Kornfeldt chronicles her many journeys around the world to meet the many researchers who have dedicated their careers to bringing back the dead. From passenger pigeons to wooly mammoths to the Pyrenean ibex, extinct animals (and some plants, too) inspire passion in a certain type of scientist, especially those with access to new DNA extraction and gene-editing techniques. In clear prose absent of jargon, the author relates the challenges and triumphs of the offbeat characters who peer into the genetic material of beings who expired tens of thousands of years ago and work to re-create it. Kornfeldt is excellent at presenting such scenarios with a wary enthusiasm, acknowledging the significant "potential and risks of de-extinction." She also notes that such researchhowever magnificent the stakesmay be met with a mixed response from the public when the born-again species are genetically modified organisms and, probably, out of human control once reintroduced in the wild. As she writes, "it remains to be seen how resurrecting a species would work in practice." The author's careful synthesis of accomplishment versus aspiration is also spot-oneven world-class scientists will be dreamers, and there is much more research to be conducted before mammoths once again lumber across the tundra.Wondrous tales of futuristic science experiments that happen to be true. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Extinction might not be forever! From DNA that has survived in preserved specimens or vials of frozen blood, scientists may be able to propagate extinct species. Dinosaurs will probably not be included. Science journalist Kornfeldt here recounts his world travels to visit scientists working to repopulate wild places with mammoths, passenger pigeons, Pyrenean ibex, northern white rhinoceros, missing corals, and other extinct, or virtually extinct, species. Each project faces unique problems related to extracting and shaping DNA and then implanting it into hosts. Ethical questions also loom over the work. Will the new individuals be truly restored species in their pure form, genetically modified related species, or new creations? Will they know instinctively how to behave in their former homelands? Will they save or destroy their habitats? Who will decide a species' fate? Free of most scientific jargon, Kornfeldt's book is an eye-opening introduction to an important new field of study that's well fit for public library audiences.--Rick Roche Copyright 2018 Booklist
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Whole New World | p. 1 |
1 Summer in Siberia | p. 7 |
2 Who Wants to Build a Mammoth? | p. 17 |
3 Zombie Spring | p. 33 |
4 A Winged Storm | p. 47 |
5 New Kid on the Block | p. 67 |
6 The Rhino That Came in from the Cold | p. 79 |
7 'It's Not Quite That Simple' | p. 95 |
8 God's Toolkit | p. 109 |
9 The Growing Dead | p. 119 |
10 If It Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck - Is It an Aurochs? | p. 135 |
11 A Wilder Europe | p. 149 |
12 'Most People Would Call This Totally Insane' | p. 163 |
13 A Chicken's Inner Dinosaur | p. 173 |
14 The Fine Line Between Utopia and Dystopia | p. 187 |
15 A Melting Giant | p. 195 |
Conclusion: Life Will Find a Way | p. 205 |
Acknowledgements | p. 213 |
List of Illustrations | p. 217 |
Sources, Notes, and Further Reading | p. 219 |