Rise of the Necrofauna
Britt Wray
Greystone Books, $26.95
A theme park populated with re-created dinosaurs is fiction. But if a handful of dedicated scientists have their way, a park with woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons and other “de-extincted” animals could become reality.
In Rise of the Necrofauna, writer and radio broadcaster Britt Wray presents a comprehensive look at the unprecedented technical difficulties of raising the dead, plus the deep philosophical questions surrounding de-extinction.
The aim of current de-extinction efforts is to use gene-editing tools to engineer living species to re-create extinct cousins, such as engineering a woolly mammoth from an elephant. This “molecular magic” is not the effort’s main limitation, de-extinction scientist George Church claims in the book. Instead, the biggest hurdles are the same that conservationists face when reintroducing endangered species to native habitats.