Extract from ABC News
A university professor and a jeweller from Tasmania have collaborated on a science installation at the University of Melbourne to ask the not-so-simple question: Should we bring the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction?
Professor Andrew Pask heads the Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research (TIGRR) lab, a partnership between the university and US-based genetic engineering firm Colossal Biosciences, a company known for wanting to de-extinct the woolly mammoth.
Standing in the exhibition Not Natural, Professor Pask explains the advancements his team have made since 2022, when they announced the project to bring back the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, from extinction.
"A really big part of the project is taking that fat-tailed dunnart cell and putting all of the edits into it to really re-engineer the thylacine back into existence," he said.
Yes, you read that correctly.
This mouse-looking marsupial that can easily fit in the palm of your hand will play an essential role in bringing back the thylacine.
This is because the fat-tailed dunnart is one of the thylacine's closest living relatives and will provide not only living cells but the genomic template that TIGRR will use.
"We've started to make thousands of edits to those cells. So we're really along that trajectory of recreating that thylacine cell, which is really exciting," Professor Pask said.
"Through the thylacine de-extinction work, we were able to develop marsupial stem cells. We can collect tissues from animals right now and turn those cells into stem cells and freeze them down in a biobank where they'll live in suspension forever."
Biobanking could ensure native species are protected from future extinction events.
Professor Pask said scientists would be able to "put Kangaroo Island koalas back on Kangaroo Island or bilbies from Hobart back into Hobart … So we'll have each of that specific genetic diversity that exists in that exact region saved and kept forever."
"I think one of the greatest spin-off technologies is this ability to create a marsupial biobank."
Lockets, memories and DNA
Emma Bugg, a Tasmanian artist whose work features in the exhibition, remains a little sceptical about de-extinction but says meeting Professor Pask and learning about the biobank has helped inform her views.
"It made me feel satisfied that the greater marsupial research all feeds back into marsupial conservation," she said.
"The thylacine is a fantastic end goal, if possible, but everything they do leads into other marsupial species."
Incorporating data and information into jewellery has been a long-held interest for Emma, and one of her lockets is displayed prominently within the exhibition.
"A historical locket would contain hair and a photograph but what I'm looking at here is a contemporary version of that, which contains thylacine DNA," Bugg said.
"It contains a small vial that has the DNA inside it, a glass slide with DNA, and a piece of thylacine pelt."
Visiting the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) and seeing the video of the last thylacine pacing up and down in its enclosure at Beaumaris Zoo had a profound impact on Bugg when she was a child.
"That was the beginning of this idea about this sadness, and this feeling of remorse that this creature is gone. We could have touched it but it's just beyond our lifetime," she said.
"It's etched into the memories of a lot of Tasmanians."
Surveying the great minds of the future
A survey within the installation invites visitors to ponder the question: "Should we even be doing this?"
Perusing the exhibition, university student Dubhessa Bryant said: "We ultimately were responsible for its extinction but then how is it going to interact with the environment after so long a time?
"However, I think the direction the research is going is really positive, especially creating banks of genomes of current marsupials."
Juneau Murray-De-Brossard believes: "It's great to bring back an animal that we lost because of colonialism."
Student Oscar Lelia does not have too many ethical concerns with the concept of de-extinction.
"When you're replicating an animal by inserting a bit of a genome into another genome you're not 100-per-cent sure how it's going to react. It's not going to be exactly the same as a thylacine," he said.
Fellow student Astrid Robson was concerned about the environmental impact.
"Ecosystems have already adapted to fill up the gap that was left behind," she said.
In 12 years, on the 100-year anniversary of the death of the last thylacine in captivity, Bugg plans to revisit the data collected from her survey.
"Some of the kids that responded will now be adults and things will be further along."
Professor Pask said his team were confident that by 2036, they would have been successful in their efforts to de-extinct the thylacine.
"We've been working on this for two years now with really significant funding and it's just been transformative over that couple of years," he said.
"We're probably thinking [it will be] about 10 years before we actually have a completely engineered thylacine cell and starting to have those conversations about re-wilding animals, putting animals back into the landscape."
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