Lars Kenseth

“I think there’s a huge misconception about how much science is actually going on. In the back corner of George Church’s lab [at Harvard] they have a few people who are using a tiny amount of resources that are available to them to attempt to swap out genes in elephant cells which are growing in culture in a dish in a lab. I have a student who’s trying to convince me that it’s a good idea to bring passenger pigeons back to life. There’s a group in Australia who are thinking about the gastric-brooding frog but are stuck because they can’t cause the cells to actually grow up. There’s a group in New Zealand that is thinking about bringing a Moa [an extinct bird] back to life and are working on sequencing the moa genome, which is not de-extinction, in itself. There’s a Spanish group that’s thinking about the bucardo [a subspecies of Spanish ibex that went extinct in 2000], and there’s the backbreeding group for the aurochs [an extinct species of wild cattle] in Holland. That’s it. That’s everything that’s going on in the world right now.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“The bull the testicles came from was named Yasufuku, a prized sire whose offspring grew into beautiful bovine specimens that could be farmed for their marbled Wagyu beef.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“We still tend to speak of Neanderthals as though they’re somehow alien from us, even though many of our genomes show that they’re literally a part of us. To be a species is a murky thing. Many of us are mutts already, but de-extinction could multiply the spectrum of hybridity in some startling ways.”
― Britt Wray, Rise of the Necrofauna: A Provocative Look at the Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction

“An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark