Carl Zimmer Bringing Them Back To Life Analysis

In the article Bringing Them Back to Life by Carl Zimmer, scientists are debating on whether they should bring back extinct animals or not. Some say that it would be cool to actually “de-extinct” an animal, but is it really worth the time and money to do so? Cloning can involve several different processes such as injecting nuclei into other animal cells, restructuring genomes and reprogramming cells. Bringing back or cloning animals from the past would be great scientific achievement but then again the past is the past and should maybe left that way. There is great debate of de-extinction; the pros of scientific advancement and preservation or the cons of playing God and wasting money.

There are many pros and cons to this amazing yet very difficult cloning issue. The pros would be scientific advancement and the preservation of species. Scientists could try to experiment on other animals, which could lead to cloned animals, and therefore, scientific advancement. As Carl Zimmer points out, “the only species we can hope to revive now are those that died within the past few tens of thousands of years and …show more content…
The scientific advancement and the preservation of species continue to help with understanding why animals became extinct in the first place. Just as noted in the article by Carl Zimmer, “De-extinction advocates counter that the cloning and genomic engineering technologies being developed for de-extinction could also help preserve endangered species, especially ones that don’t breed easily in captivity”. The expense of cloning has been a concern. Carl Zimmer later states, “And though cutting-edge biotechnology can be expensive when it’s first developed, it has a way of becoming very cheap very fast”. If cloning can help preserve endangered species and the costs are not so expensive, then maybe it’s a win win for