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De-extinction: Costs, benefits and ethics

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1, Article number: 0105 (2017) Cite this article

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Cost–benefit analysis suggests that the costs of de-extinction could imperil conservation of extant biodiversity in many cases. But there is also an ethical dimension to this debate that cannot be ignored.

De-extinction refers to creating living organisms that are genetically very similar to members of an extinct species. Technical barriers to de-extinction are being steadily overcome, and researchers have begun to ask whether and when de-extinction ought to be done. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Joseph Bennett and colleagues take up the matter as it pertains to biodiversity conservation — that is, when, if ever, de-extinction should be used as a conservation tool. Their approach is to try to determine “the relative cost versus benefit for biodiversity” of engaging in de-extinction with reintroduction. They do this by first predicting what conservation efforts for reconstituted species would involve (by extrapolating from conservation efforts for proxy extant species; see pictured examples), and then predicting what the impacts of those efforts would be on extant threatened species1. In almost all the cases and scenarios considered, they find that the cost to conservation benefit ratio is worse for de-extinction than it is for extant threatened species — that is, funding reconstitution, reintroduction and maintenance of extinct species would either provide smaller conservation benefits than funding conservation of extant threatened species or limit the number of extant species that could be conserved. Because the conservation costs would outweigh the conservation gains, they conclude that “it is unlikely that de-extinction could be justified on grounds of biodiversity conservation”.

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References

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  1. Ronald Sandler is in the Department of Philosophy, Northeastern University, 371 Holmes Hall, Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5000, USA.,

    Ronald Sandler

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  1. Ronald Sandler
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Correspondence to Ronald Sandler.

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Sandler, R. De-extinction: Costs, benefits and ethics. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0105

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