Revive and Restore...How to to bring extinct species back to life

I've recently read in a post on GenomeWeb this curious news about a new company called Revive and Restore. Their main goal is to use advanced genomic technologies to recover or reconstruct the DNA of extinct species with the aim to revive them.

In an interview posted at Edge.org, Ryan Phelan, executive director of Revive and Restore, says the effort grew out of her work with George Church and the Personal Genome Project. "Right now, George's approach of basically editing the genome starts to make the concept of bringing something back really plausible," she says.

The idea is to recover genome sequence information from extinct species and then use it to massively edit the DNA of a still living close relative until its genome matches that of the extinct one.

Reading this news, one could not avoid to remember the famous Jurassic Park movie, and the unlucky ending of their project of reviving dinosaurs. Honestly, I prefer to see a T-rex standing in a museum rather than a living one hunting at me... Going back to the real world, this project rises major ethical and ecological issues. Who is the one who can decide which species to revive? What would be their impact on the ecosystem?

In fact exctinction is a consequence of natural selection, it's the way nature shapes the world we live in. However Phelan argues that extinction "is 99.9 percent caused by man," and if that's the case, "do we have a little bit of responsibility to think about bringing it back now that we have science that can easily allow for it?".

However, things are moving fast and a new project has started at Revive and Restore to recover the extinct Passenger Pidgeon, editing the genome of the common Pidgeon.