Who wouldn’t give pots of money or anything they owned for even a short time more with a loved one who has died? Instead, we are left with the hurt and sorrow, the feeling we have lost part of ourselves.
In the animal kingdom, whole orders and families of creatures have died out, many of them as a result of human behaviour.
They have been killed by hunting and by introduced predators, and because we have destroyed their habitat directly by burning or through ongoing insidious changes to their food sources, including plant distribution, as a consequence of climate change.
What if we could really bring these animals back somehow, rather than just in our minds? You might say we owe them that at least.
Could we start with moa? That’s the idea which has burst through into the media this week, courtesy of United States biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, Ngāi Tahu, Canterbury Museum and film-maker Sir Peter Jackson.
Through the use of genetic engineering and DNA in preserved moa remains, they believe South Island giant moa hatchlings could be restored to life in less than eight years.
New Zealand has a shocking roll call of species which have become extinct since the first Polynesians arrived some time in the late 13th century.
Those settlers were accompanied by the Pacific rat, kiore, which exterminated some bird species, and then Europeans arrived some 500 years later with their deadly cargo of stoats, ferrets, weasels, Norway rats and ship rats.
New Zealand ornithologist Dr Richard Holdaway says during about 750 years of human settlement the number of vertebrate species has nearly halved, including the losses of one type of bat, more than 50 birds, three frogs and three lizards, and a freshwater fish.
Moa were hunted to extinction by about the early 1400s. Prominent Catlins archaeologist Les Lockerbie proved that those early settlers from Polynesia were responsible for wiping out moa by discovering moa bones next to moa-bone fish-hook points, necklace reels and pendants in coastal excavations.
The idea would be that the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre would oversee the project and own the moa, to be kept on an ecological reserve.
Sir Peter is cock-a-hoop at the prospect of success. He says it follows his long-held dream that many scientific wonders might become something more tangible during his lifetime.
Paul Scofield, the Canterbury Museum’s senior curator of natural history, is also excited about working with Colossal Biosciences, which is also trying to resurrect the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth.
Thousands of genes would be required to rebuild the bird’s brain, feathers, eyesight and other characteristics. A related living species would then act as a genetic surrogate.
However, a dose of reality has been injected into the scheme by University of Otago scientists, including paleogenetics laboratory director Assoc Prof Nic Rawlence. He points to Colossal’s supposedly de-extincted dire wolf, which was actually a genetically engineered grey wolf.
In the case of the moa, he believes they will simply be creating a GE emu or similar, which might look like a moa but may not function like one.
There would also be serious ethical concerns. At least 500 individuals would be needed to avoid dangerous in-breeding — that is, if they are actually able to breed.
As well, Prof Rawlence is questioning the level of iwi engagement. While carrying out genome-sequencing on the moa, scientists from the paleogenetics lab have found no appetite from individual rūnanga across the South Island to bring back moa.
He says it might also be a better use of the company’s technology to use genetic engineering to help strengthen and conserve animals now on the endangered list. We agree.
There can be no doubting it would be absolutely incredible were moa to walk the earth again after more than 500 years.
But energy, technology and money would be much better used in saving our endangered species right now, rather than attempting to reverse the arrow of time.
