What ‘de-extinction’ of woolly mammoths can teach us: a Q&A with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro
Humans have long tinkered with the evolutionary trajectories of other species. Thousands of years ago we tamed wolves into dogs and transformed a wild grass into the agricultural wonder wheat. Within the past few centuries, we exterminated the Tasmanian tiger and doomed the dodo bird to oblivion. Now, we stand on the brink of an ambitious new era in how humans may transfigure life around us: by pursuing the science of de-extinction, or the resurrection of species once lost to this world.
Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist, an ancient DNA adventurer who has collected fossilized bison bones from Arctic permafrost, and a titan in the de-extinction movement. She co-led the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a MacArthur Fellow, and is the author of the books “How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction” and “Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature.” In 2022 she announced that her team sequenced the genome of the dodo bird.
