I don't know what specifically this is about, but I can imagine...

I'd imagine something about poaching rhinos to extinction.

Gives some context here. If he fails to mate before he dies.......

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/16/afric.....n-white-rhino/

Well shit....

All for the horn, which has magical curative properties in traditional chinese and asian medicine and many traditional medicine doctors believe it's essential life-saving medication. It's just keratin, like your fingernails. It does fucking nothing biologically when ingested! It's a goddamned placebo.


As to the article, practically speaking the effort is pretty much futile. They're extinct, they just haven't stopped moving yet. You need approximately 50 individuals balanced across both sexes to maintain a healthy breeding stock even for short term. Long term survival of species needs at least 500. And those are based on idealized populations with good genetic variation. Badly inbred populations require many more individuals.

Well, now. We are living in the days of Science Fiction's past. Notions from then are becoming today's reality, all the time. So, the hope is always there. So are the fears that block such efforts.

After all, science fiction is a great tool to tell us what can be and what can be horrifically realized. What we are talking here is a parallel to Jurassic Park, after all.

There are limits to what science can do. Unless you're planning to artificially cloning every single individual of the species now and evermore.

Even if you could select the most ideally perfect specimens (and you can't anymore since what you have left is what you have left) so they wouldn't have any harmful recessive genes or genes susceptible to harmful mutations that would accumulate in a 100% inbreeding population you'd still have the problem of being a single genotype species. Just ask the Gros Michel banana how well that worked out for it. It was practically wiped out globally by a single fungal disease mid last century.

In animals the genes that encode the immune system have the greatest variability of any genes and they are constantly shuffled and rearranged on breeding because they encode the proteins the immune system responds to and are absolutely vital for robust immunity. If you have a population where every member has identical immune system then it is exceedingly susceptible to diseases and it will only be a matter of time before it is devastated.

You can't escape the lack of genetic variability, either your own genes will do you in with inbreeding or your lack of variation will lead to the environment doing you in. A species without enough variability in its breeding stock will inevitably die out in nature.

You bring up some great points.

But, science is always expanding outwards on those limits. Remember that once upon a time, Science was limited to picking up crude tools and banging holes in a patient's head to let out the demons and creating holes in rocks to pound other rocks into to mash plant material. If there's one things us Humans seem to be drawn towards is figuring out everything that we once deemed as 'God territory'.

In theory, every living species had to have an origin. How diverse or limited could that source be? I don't even remotely know. But, I do know that a Genie didn't just pop out of a bottle and generate a herd of trillions of Rhinos, once upon a time. Just because Humanity of 2015 may not be ready to tackle this miracle of life...don't rule it out as impossible.

"Never say never."

As for me...I'm so far off the cutting edge of science that I can't even see the wave from here. ;P

I do not know why but this is cute and sad at the same time.

Well, time to return the favor and snuff a few humenz. Right in your area of expertise.